Most popular games are single-threaded
Minecraft, Rust, Valheim, ARK, Factorio and most other community-server favourites run their core simulation on essentially one CPU core, not spread evenly across many. That means a modern CPU running at a high clock speed will outperform an older chip with twice the core count, even though the older one might look stronger on a spec sheet that just lists “cores.” Clock speed and CPU generation matter more than core count for almost every popular game server.
CPU, RAM and storage — what to actually look for
Look for a specific CPU model, not just “high-performance CPU.” Modern chips like the Ryzen 9 7950X or 9950X, or a recent Intel i9, are the current benchmark. If a provider won’t name the actual CPU, that’s worth asking about directly.
A world’s memory usage climbs over time as more gets built, explored and saved — a fresh world uses far less than the same one six months later. Buy headroom, not just what today’s player count technically requires.
“SSD” alone doesn’t tell you much — NVMe SSDs are meaningfully faster than older SATA SSDs for the frequent small writes game servers do constantly during autosaves. Ask specifically whether storage is NVMe.
The RAM generation matters too, not just the amount
DDR5 memory has meaningfully more bandwidth than the older DDR4 standard — this shows up specifically when a server is loading a large world, generating new terrain, or handling many players with mods active at once. DDR5 is the standard to expect from a current, well-specced host; a provider still running DDR4 across the board is running older hardware, even if the raw RAM quantity looks fine on paper.
How much do you actually need?
These are general starting points — always check your specific game’s requirements, since heavier titles like ARK or modded Minecraft need meaningfully more than lighter ones like Terraria.
| Group size | Typical RAM needed | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A handful of friends (2-8 players), vanilla | 4-8GB | Comfortable floor for most lighter games |
| Standard community (8-20 players) | 8-16GB | Where most well-run community servers sit |
| Large or heavily modded (20+ players, or big modpacks) | 16-32GB+ | Modded servers especially can climb fast — check your specific mod list |
For exact figures on a specific game, our per-game guides go into real detail — see our ARK or Project Zomboid hardware breakdowns as examples of the level of detail we cover per title.
