Hi, i talked to a guy who owns a GSP on msn and he told me that xeons werent good for CS 1.6 server hosting and thats why he removed all his offered dedicated servers that had xeon chips and now he only offers C2Q 9300. Is C2Q 9300 really better than 5430? According to benchmark results, 9300 is close to Xeon 5430 2.66 ghz. Would getting two 9300 servers 4-8 gb of ram each at an average of $175 each better than getting Dual Quad Core Xeon 5430 with 8 gb of ram?
Whats your opinion?
Xeons or C2Q for Game servers?
Also, i would probably be getting more total bandwidth, hd and ram with the C2Q 9300s

Interesting question and I am glad you brought it to WHT.
It has been awhile since I've hosted many CS1.6 servers as the majority are CSS now, but your arguments sakes CSS is more a showstopper than CS1.6 so it still works out experience wise. My first question is: At what tickrate and FPS will these servers be running at? I think that will have a greater impact on my suggestion that anything else.
The Xeon based system will cost more overall but I am pretty sure the CPUs will outperform the Core2Quads, the reason being:
-The E5430 is a server based processor and its equivalent desktop CPU, the Q9450, is not the CPU you would be receiving if you went the two server route
-The E5430 has double the L2 Cache as the Q9300 (12MB per CPU for the E5430 vs. 6MB per CPU for the Q9300)
-The E5430 operates at a slightly faster clock speed. Gong with the Dual Xeon setup would leave you with 1.328GHz more overall speed spread across your 8 cores.
Passmark Benchmarks:
E5430 Dual CPU - 7,684
Q9300 - 3,348 (3,348*2= 6,696)
(Source: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)
I currently have a Q9400 based server and it does not seem to handle the same way an older server I used to have when it comes to CS and CSS game servers. The old server was a X3220 (2.4GHz 4MB L2 Cache, 1066FSB)
The benefits of having two servers is that you can balance the load over a greater number of physical machines, better redundancy (as in not all your eggs are in one basket), more HDD space, and more bandwidth.