well was just thinking about what else other than a fast internet connection is exactly required to setup a server (hardware point of view)........i have setup a server a couple of times before this,but theres a lot of lag.....the ping time is the least of all the demo servers though almost every time.....

Well, let's see...

Dual socket 940 motherboard
2 dual core AMD Opterons
4 gigs of RAM
RAID cabinet with 60 hard drives (all at 15,000 RPM in RAID 0 mode)
Quad channel SCSI RAID card
Fiber optic internet connection

That should be just about good enough.

In all seriousness, I don't think you need a very hot computer at all to run a dedicated server (i.e. no graphics). If you're running a listen server (allows you to play on the server instead of having to connect to it from a different computer), I'm not sure. The physics and graphics processing required with a listen server may adversely affect server performance.

Your average $10 PC should run a server just fine, ~300 mhz, 64mb ram? . Bandwidth is the limiting factor.

300Mhz is the absolute bottom end for a reliable server tho', It'll work although not with more than a couple of players and laggy at that even on a LAN. I'm currently experimenting with a 500Mhz x 128Mb machine and that seems to be a nice 'practical' minimum. still nice and cheap (sometimes free)

as far as i'm aware LFS doesen't need a huge amount of ram, Trouble is, Windows does.

It's a bit 'lighter' with a linux install + wine. although sometimes tricky to set up, and you'd wanna use one of the smaller disros to save on bloat IMHO

Quote from Forbin :

RAID cabinet with 60 hard drives (all at 15,000 RPM in RAID 0 mode)

Too bad RAID 0 sucks balls.

I ran a server on a 766mhz Celeron with 128mb ram and a 20gb 5,400 RPM HDD (yes it was a laptop), ran fine, anything I threw down (give or take, some games would get a little too demanding, BF2 for example with 64 players would hurt it bad on a LAN), but it ran better when I got a 100mhz faster proc and changed to a PIII. However that lappy is now dead (fell out of a 6ft high cupboard, all the parts work but the screen is totaled, so it's shipped to try and get a replacment screen).

Also my 400mhz G3, 256mb PC133 SDRAM runs a nice HL2 server with FC4 on it

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

Too bad RAID 0 sucks balls.

I would disagree, sure it doesn't offer any redundancy (so is it true RAID?) but it can offer a performance increase if you've got money to burn

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

Too bad RAID 0 sucks balls.

Maybe I should have just said RAID mode of your choice, but whatever.

Quote from Forbin :

Maybe I should have just said RAID mode of your choice, but whatever.

Well if you want a 60 drive array then RAID 0 wouldn't be the best choice. Saying that even if you had a small number of HDD's RAID 0 would suck, as once 1 HDD downs, you lose the lot.