Gamerail?

[BnD|Sleeper]

Hey John/Tom, have you considered something with gamerail? I have personally noticed a massive difference playing Fortress Forever on servers with GameRail - I liked their service idea from the beginning - they really do help skip quite a few hops making people like me have very low ping (~10 ms to Seattle and I am over 200 miles from Seattle... in middle of nowhere Pullman at Washington State University - so yes there is SOMETHING here ).

If you guys think your offerings are already compensating enough, that's alright but I recommend you test out some gamerail-enabled servers, they are noticeably faster (lower latency).

Also, how are those "tests" with AMD Barcelona coming? - hurry up, I want my server on Barcelona and off this junky Intel

Sleeper

P.S. The Intels are "decent" - top of the line Intel, but far inferior to AMD's cheaper, more power efficient and more powerful by a factor of over 25% Barcelona's!

[Nick|NFo]

We already have with Gamerail; there is a reason why we have been on their site for quite some time

http://www.gamerail.com/contentproviders.php

At some of our locations, Gamerail connects to us directly, in others indirectly through Internap. If Gamerail isn't connecting you to our Seattle location properly, then it should be looked at further. It is up to Gamerail to connect to Internap and finish the connections, which afaik, they haven't at all locations. The first location was Los Angeles.

As for the AMD's and some more details on Gamerail, I'll let Edge100x elaborate some more in his reply.

[Edge100x]

We connect directly with GameRail in Seattle, and you should be using it to get to us if you are using the GameRail client and connecting to most of our Premium Seattle or InterNAP Seattle servers.

Of course, our connection to WSU is <10ms anyhow .

The benchmarks I have seen of Intel's QC vs. AMD's new QC chip have Intel 3.0ghz CPUs handily beating AMD's 2.0ghz CPUs in the most important areas (pretty much everything but power consumption). And AMD's 2.0ghz part isn't even available yet on Newegg. Intel will be coming out with the new Penrons here within a month or two, which build on that even further.

So I'm not sure what benchmarks you're reading .

I haven't liked AMD ever since the Core processor become available for servers. It's simply much faster than any Opteron chip, and the Intel platform has been much more stable for us.

We're still going to give the new QC Opterons a try, but I need for at least 2.0ghz to be available first.

[BnD|Sleeper]

We connect directly with GameRail in Seattle, and you should be using it to get to us if you are using the GameRail client and connecting to most of our Premium Seattle or InterNAP Seattle servers.

Of course, our connection to WSU is <10ms anyhow .

The benchmarks I have seen of Intel's QC vs. AMD's new QC chip have Intel 3.0ghz CPUs handily beating AMD's 2.0ghz CPUs in the most important areas (pretty much everything but power consumption). And AMD's 2.0ghz part isn't even available yet on Newegg. Intel will be coming out with the new Penrons here within a month or two, which build on that even further.

So I'm not sure what benchmarks you're reading .

I haven't liked AMD ever since the Core processor become available for servers. It's simply much faster than any Opteron chip, and the Intel platform has been much more stable for us.

We're still going to give the new QC Opterons a try, but I need for at least 2.0ghz to be available first.

If we were talking Pure Raw Performance, Intel would take the cake but the customer must also pay a much larger price tag. If you read this article you will find that yes, some Intels outperform the AMD but if you compare price/performance, AMD leaves Intel's architecture/performance in the dust! So in all actuality, AMD is far more cost-efficient than Intel but does not win raw power to compare with the highest-end Intels.

Sleeper

P.S. John, I sure you hope you know WSU > UW - if not, now you do.

[Edge100x]

Sleeper, our main criteria are raw performance and performance/watt. For high-end server machines, prices for both brands are actually pretty similar, and they have similar performance/watt numbers. Right now Intel is the proven solution, and the fact that it was so much better (we-were-blown-away better) than previous Opterons makes me wary of going back to something that's Opteron based.

Also, keep in mind that since PC games are single-threaded, the fact that Intel's QC opterons are just two DCs "taped together" doesn't actually make a difference for us. The QC Opteron benchmarks that have it nearly tying Intel are often based on multi-threaded apps that benefit from the more closely-tied cores in those CPUs; you'll have to mentally compensate and bring them down a notch.

John, I sure you hope you know WSU > UW - if not, now you do.

Now I know you're just crazy

[BnD|Sleeper]

Sleeper, our main criteria are raw performance and performance/watt. For high-end server machines, prices for both brands are actually pretty similar, and they have similar performance/watt numbers. Right now Intel is the proven solution, and the fact that it was so much better (we-were-blown-away better) than previous Opterons makes me wary of going back to something that's Opteron based.

Also, keep in mind that since PC games are single-threaded, the fact that Intel's QC opterons are just two DCs "taped together" doesn't actually make a difference for us. The QC Opteron benchmarks that have it nearly tying Intel are often based on multi-threaded apps that benefit from the more closely-tied cores in those CPUs; you'll have to mentally compensate and bring them down a notch.

John, I sure you hope you know WSU > UW - if not, now you do.

Now I know you're just crazy

I may be crazy but it's true . (note: not in football, but basketball yes). In general with everything in consideration: WSU > UW.

Anyways, we'll just see once 2Ghz Barcelona's are more widely available and of course on one of my favorite sites, Newegg . I go there just for kicks and drool over what I want to buy, but have to stop dreaming before I grab my credit card .

Sleeper