I get tons of emails each week regarding dedicated servers for Half Life and questions like “What hardware should I use for my dedicated Server?”, “Do the server emulators for Half Life support DualCore processors?”, “Where can I rent dedicated servers for Half Life?” and “Should I go for an AMD or Intel processor when I start my private Half Life server?”. I have been spending a lot of time in this business and I have been running multiply game servers a few years ago so I know what you need but I can’t act like an online support for Half Life and private servers. That’s why I have written these tips for you.

First of I would like make sure you know that the server emulators today support Dual-Core processors and either if you choose Intel or AMD as the processor for the game server you will be satisfied. But I would recommend going for a new DualCore processor like AMD Athlon X2 or AMD Opteron if you would like to host many players on your Half Life server. If you decide to use Intel then you will have to make sure that you go with their new Conroe (Intel Core 2 Duo) or Yonah processors because the old Intel Dual-Core are not that fast.

If we take a look in the near future we will see that AMD will launch their new serie of processors to the winter and at the spring 2007 the Quad Core processor will be for sale in your computer store. Processors with multiple cores are very good for dedicated game servers and gives you great performance. It's very hard for game developers to use 2 cores of a processor for the game but with emulators it's much easier. Because of that I belive when the Intel and AMD Quad Core processors reaches the market, we will be able to host great Half Life servers for a small amount of money.

If you do not have a fast internet access at home I would personally choose to rent a dedicated game server by a hosting company. By doing this you will get a great speed, good performance and enjoy your server much more than if you would host it at home. Of course this is maybe not the cheapest way but if you are a couple of friends you will probably be able to rent your Half Life server.

Remember to use a lot of memory in the server and fast hard drives for the memory swap. The only specific hardware I will recommand is for the processors. This is because these are the ones that make most difference in a dedicated server.
Try using: AMD X2 or Opteron processors with Dual Cores, the Intel Xeon processors or the new Intel Core 2 Duo. If you have limited funds then try going with AMDs single Opteron processor or a fast Athlon processor. Make sure you get 1MB of L2 cache and the new platform (AM2) if you choose the AMD processor for you dedicated server.