[ILoveJava]

Hey guys, In a few years, I want to start a business venture by re-opening a very popular LAN center, I have friends who are networkers, so I have no problem with that.

But what kind of hardware should I be aiming for, so I'm not using too much money? Looking for something with okay performance, but not super expensive.

[modi123_1]

When you say "lan center" what does that specifically entail?

[ILoveJava]

A place where people can go to pay to play games in close quarters with friends, or just simply browse the web.

[modi123_1]

Oh.. well a phat internet pipe coming in... a rack of decent switches.. wifi access points.. decent webfiltering/firewalling... the pcs will require monitors, towers, maintenance, lock down on what can and can't happen.. a billing method.. around and around and around it goes.

You'll want to figure out how many hardwired drops you'll need to support. Then find decent rack switches that can hold that many ports and a bit extra.

example:
http://www.amazon.co...t/dp/B004SUO1S0

these tend to be on racks.. you can find people selling some on craigslist (locally) for cheap..

spools of cat5 to run that..

a decent coverage of wifi access points..

There's a good start.

[ILoveJava]

WiFi access, never thought of doing this. Haha. And I already have software to control al billing and stuff.

What my real question was, like conputer hardware for pc's in the lan center.

[modi123_1]

Switches... and cat5 then.

[ILoveJava]

I mean motherboards, cpu, psu, gpu, hdd's, etc.

[modi123_1]

Okay.. let's back up. Are you asking about the terminals the people will use, or is this something that facilitates something else?

If it's the former - I would figure out a list of games you want to play... aggregate the required specs... and see what's up. So figure out that and write out their recommend specs..

My guess is, at minimum, a dual core chip of some weight.. AMD tends to be substantially cheaper.. four gb of ram.. a pick of videocard... and something that's a smallish hd - 320gb or so since there won't be crazy space on there.. etc. The name of the game is 'enough power to play the games but not some fancy build you would do yourself'.

Preferably all the systems would be homogenized with spare parts in the back. When you are ready to get this going you might think about contacting dell's small business arm and see if you can pickup a bulk deal.

Though as I think about it I begin to wonder if you could buy a beefy server to host desktop visualization and a grip of cheap desktop clients to get their desktops served to them.. hmm..

http://hdx.citrix.com/hdxrichgraphics
https://blogs.techne...Redirected=true

[ILoveJava]

AMD I will never use, just saying. Even though AMD CPU's are a fair bit cheaper than Intel's, I would never go there. It's just a personal thing, like Windows users never using Mac.
320GB HDD would be perfect, it's not too little space, and it's not overly huge, and they are nicely priced, too.

And yes, definitely spare parts in the back. I had the idea of building 20 mediocre pc's. Costing me about $900~ each. And then building 4 high performance pc's for an extra charge.

And while using a server and then mirroring off of that is an idea, the guy who owned the previous LAN that I want to re-build kind of influenced me away from that way of running because he had MASSIVE problems with it when multiple people were playing the game.

[no2pencil]

ILoveJava, on 27 April 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

I want to start a business venture by re-opening a very popular LAN center

How long has it been closed for? Why was it closed? Internet Cafe's in the US have not been an Internet Cafe for a long, long time. They are gambling huts.

ILoveJava, on 28 April 2012 - 10:21 PM, said:

And yes, definitely spare parts in the back. I had the idea of building 20 mediocre pc's. Costing me about $900~ each. And then building 4 high performance pc's for an extra charge.

Yikes. Maybe you know something I don't, but most people I know have a pc or two, a laptop, a netbook, a smart phone, something. There is little (more like no) need to leave the home for internet. I am certainly not one to tell you how to do your thing, but that's a LOT of money to be shelling out for this sort of thing.

[ILoveJava]

The center shut down because the owner (my friends mum) went back to University to study teaching, and had no time to run the shop anymore. And with the friends I have, who used to frequent the shop, they will come. Most of them have extremely powerful computers, but will prefer to play games with other guys in a close vicinity.

also, this is in Australia, not America.

[The Architect 2.0]

the only difference between a house setup and an internet cafe is the networking equipment. The individual boxes don't matter.

You can dislike AMD all you like; its your choice to make a bad business decision*. It's a simple fact that AMD is way better bang for buck for gaming systems.

Anyhow, I recommend 1080p monitors powered by a four-core AMD CPU and a HD 7870. Use 4GB of RAM and put in a cheap boot SSD with the OS and the most popular games**. The SSD part is totally optional of course, might make a good marketing point. The rest of the box is irrelevant.

that box up there would cost roughly $1200 in the states. It is optimized for medium-high (not ultra) quality for most popular FPS games.

If you can overclock your components (while still maintaining warranty), it will save you up to $100-$150 per box.

AMD vs Intel is NOT like Windows vs OS X at all; you can actually tell the difference between the software.



*unless, somehow, AMD is more expensive in Australia...which would be odd indeed

**alternatively, get a 750GB momentus XT and hope that everyone will play the same games so that the cache can be used.