Inquiry for optimal LANing price structure and equipment

[Atlanteax]

To make a long story short...

For one of my classes (Masters degree), I'm writing up a Business Proposal based on the concept of a start-up that serves as a computer gaming location.

Idea is to have 16 (or more) high-powered computers all hooked up together in a LAN with a T-1 connection.

Revenue would primarily be generated by "rental" of the computer every 15 minutes (final 15 minutes is waived).

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I have two questions for you guys...

One, is how much would you be willing to pay, or how much you think most gamers would be willing to pay.

I was thinking something along the lines of $4/hr ... possibly combined with lower rates for more continuous hours, and/ore lower rates at certain times of the day. And a flat $20+ fee for the weekly all-night LAN party.

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Second, what you think the ideal PC would be? That would appeal to you to utilize, as opposed to your own computer, or dragging your own computer to a LAN party. Budget would be roughly $2500 per, with the intention to take advantage of probable discounts when getting them in volume.

I'm thinking...
Pentium 4 at 2+ ghz
20-40 GB hard-drive (likely won't need that much space)
512 RAM (is it possible now for 1024?)
High-quality monitor
... as the core basis of one PC

I noticed in one thread that some are arguing that DDRAM is better than SD? Why?

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Anyhow, any opinions/comments would be appreciated...

[AnticorRifling]

For the PC make it 1024 of RAM, and yes you can do that easy my laptop has that and my desktop has 1.24G

Also you need a bitching graphics card, no point in having ram and process power without a good graphics card.

4 an hour sounds resonable with membership options for lower rates and flat rates for extended play etc.

Also if it were me I'd have the t-1 backbone fed to a WAP and install 802.11B (G if you can) wireless cards in the desktops. Main reasoning for this, you can rearrange at your leisure, it can actually be cheaper than running copper. If you need a price estimate for this let me know.

[Miss Jade]

or you can scrap the pc idea and go with x box or ps2 cyber athletes. xbox is like 150? of course youd have to get tvs..... maybe split the network have a byo lan part.
________
Vaporizor (http://vaporizer.org/)

[Wezas]

You'd also need to configure into that price the cost of a copy of each game you want available for each PC. A liscense for each one. So, for instance if you wanted Unreal Tournament 2004 on each PC (16*$40) = $640. And that's just for one game.

The only one I've been to was in a Wizards of the Coast in Pentagon City. They don't have them anymore, but when I was there it was basically $3 for 30 minutes. You might want to consider maybe $3 for 30 minutes or $5/hr. A few people from work went on our lunch break and 30 minutes is all we could do.

As for the PC, HD space won't be too much of an issue, but depending on how many games you'd have installed, I'd probably go for the 40gb (most companies do at least that now). DDR Ram is better (Double Data Rate, supposedly is ~ twice as fast), and isn't that expensive, might be worth it.)

Best buy has a Sony that is sold out (and I can see why) here are the specs:

Sheet here (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1072285145329&skuId=6264696&product CategoryId=cat01172&type=product)

Sony Vaio 3.0ghz w/ HT Technology & 800mhz FSB - $1049 before $100 rebate
512MB PC2700 DDR RAM (can be replaced or added to)
160 GB HD
ATI Radeon 9200 AGP 8x Graphics Accelerator w/ 128 DDR video memory
Windows XP Home
DVD+/-RW
3.5" Floppy

And for under $200 you can get 2 PC4200 DDR 512mb chips to get your 1gb of RAM

You can also get a better Video card, though that one should do the trick.

$2500 is more then you'll need for a kick ass gaming PC. I'd say $1500 will put you where you want to be (including all the games necessary)

[Edited on 5-27-2004 by Wezas]

[Straight-up]

Hmm I think even building a "kick ass" gaming rig for 1500 is pushing it IMO. I realize you would not want to build top of the line machines for this, but still. Buying prebuilt machines is generally not the best for gaming..although it can be done. The minimum specs for gaming machines I would go with are:

P4s with 2.4GHz and the 800 MHZ Bus. Not sure you can even get a 2.4 with that so you may end up with 2.8s or 3s. (I personally would go with an AMD based machine...the only pentiums that are comparing (not beating) to them are the Extreme Edition, and the price difference is huge.)

1-2 GB of high performance (not value brand) RAM. Most of the new games this year are going to need over 1GB of RAM for optimal playing.

MOBO with onboard gigabit ethernet and all the other goodies a good MOBO should have. I tend to favor ASUS.

Hi-speed CD/CDRW.

Top end Graphics card. Right now that is the top end 256MB Radeon card. Nvidia has a new card coming which is "supposedly" going to kick everything's butt.

A single fast high rpm small to medium sized SATA hard drive. Honestly you can probably go with an 80 GB HD and be fine for years. If you really want speed go with two fast small SATA drives in a RAID 0 or a 0 variant. But I think that is pushing it for a commercial operation.

Monitors..19 inch CRT or better.

Do not go with cordless Mice, too easy to steal them or batteries. And they eat batteries. Go with corded optical mice.

You will also need at least decent speaker systems and sound cards for most of these. Although alot of the on-board soundcards with the new motherboards work fine for gaming. I would also consider either having or renting headphones. With that in mind try to get a setup with headphone and USB jacks on the front of the box. Most have this, but it pays to make sure.


I would strongly advise you to go with some sort of disk imaging software that you can restore computers that get messed up quickly with.

With this many units you are pretty much going to have to have a dedicated server. For this machine you can probably get away with less of the goodies (graphics card and sound and such). But you are going to want it to be a big boy as far as hard drive space, RAM and processor power. If you end up having to store a distinct disk image for each machine (I am not sure how picky XP is about that and even with identical systems you might need to), each machine image is going to probably suck up about 1/2 it's HD space as an image. So if you have 10 gigs of data on the client machine...the image is going to take up about 5 on your server. 40 gigs of programs and such would yield 20 GB images for example and times 16 would give you 320 GB of imaging. That sounds like a lot, but consider this. Would you rather spend 5 minutes making the images and the couple hundred bucks for the HDs needed to store them. Or would you rather spend several hours reinstalling windows and all the programs and configuring it when some 15 year old hax0r toasts your OS? For safety sake I would store those images on a removeable HD/external and keep it off the LAN and out of the building.

I am sure there is more stuff...but you get the picture. On top of the above you have to figure in all the other nonsense: games, cases, keyboards, cords, cables, powersupplies, fans, room cooling for 17+ computers and people, desks/chairs, insurance, cash register/cash handling system, security system (with cameras if you know what is good for you), employee insurance, workman's comp, unemployment, liscenscing, power bills, theft, training/retraining...heh running a business sucketh. I know you were not looking for all the little details, but alot of people gloss over this kind of stuff in a classroom, and when they hit the real world and go to start their business they go "OH SHIT!".



Straight-up