What exactly is the difference between a powerful pc and a Server?
In: Technology
A server is a computer that provides a service to other devices connecting to it. A powerful computer is just that – a powerful computer. A powerful computer can be a server too, but a server does not have to be powerful.
Any PC can be a server and it doesn’t even have to be powerful. The only hard requirement to be considered a server is to provide some sort of service to the local network, such as DNS, file sharing or a web page.
Enterprise grade server hardware is built to much higher standards when compared to the average consumer grade stuff.
Often times, specific hardware is built that’s exceedingly good at one part of computing: massive storage arrays, large network transfers, rapid calculations of specific algorithms, etc.
Servers also usually have a back up/redundant items of almost everything: network interfaces, storage arrays, power supplies
Probably the biggest difference: volume. Servers are made to be stuck in cabinets with potentially dozens of other servers so they’re a very specific size/form factor. Server rooms are usually designed with a hot side and a cool side where rows of like sides point at one another. Cool air gets drawn in the front of the case and blasted it the back. Because of their shape and the way they’re intended to be installed they usually have as least twice as many fans as a household computer to pull large amounts of air through their chassis. Since they’re not in a living room, they usually pack a bunch of smaller fans in (redundancy) which are significantly louder than larger fans.
Purpose.
A powerful pc is used to perform tasks for a single user.
A server is meant to facilitate a service for multiple users and stay powered on for a long time.
Powerful PC do job for one person real quick. Powerful server do job for many people.
PCs will usually have a high end birdie card, which a server does not.
Servers usually have much more ram that allows multiple people to use the applications that are hosted on the server.
Mostly superficial things like the shape. PCs that are sold as servers are designed to fit together with lots of other ones in metal racks in server rooms. Normal PCs are designed to fit under your desk or on your desk.
Also servers are louder, because they have smaller fans to fit in the right shape, so the fans have to spin faster.
Also the specific parts in the server may be different. Like multiple CPUs in one computer, room for 20 hard drives (not joking), probably no room for a graphics card. A lot of them are designed to get the most speed per dollar – because that when people are buying 200 of them, that means they can buy *less* – not to get a reasonable level of performance for a reasonable number of dollars like a PC (because who cares if your PC has 4 CPUs in it if you only need one?).
At the end of the day? Nothing. A server is just a computer which, well, serves. You might buy a machine with different specs than you would for a PC, but the hardware and software aren’t actually special. You can run a server on a regular old laptop, depending on your performance needs.
One of the things I’ve heard about is the power draw. The more watts you pull, the amps start to get very high. Volts don’t generally increase the heat of a system very much, but the higher the amps, the more heat you are going to get. The way to keep the amps down is to step up the volts to get more amps.
Volts times amps equals the watts. If you need more power, you raise the volts to keep the amps reasonably low. Some powerful computers have a 12V power supply. This converts the mains voltage to 12V DC, in the US its typically 110V AC.
Servers sometimes use a 24V power supply, and the largest ones use a 48V power supply. Somewhere around 60V DC, the possibility begins to occur where voltage could penetrate dry human skin, so I haven’t heard of a higher voltage being used.
Fundamentally, not much. A home computer can be a server, and a server doesn’t even have to be powerful (I have a 15 dollar raspberry pi 1 as a dns server with “pi-hole” installed). All a computer needs to do to be classified as a server is to offer services to other computers.
You could use any sort of network-capable computer for this task, but if the computer is hosting any sort of important service, it is a good idea to get a purpose-built server. Such a computer will for example have two power supplies, so that if one stops working, the server will still be 100% operational and there will be no loss of service.
Other common features of a “proper” server is to have a completely separate mini-computer built into the server that can reboot the main server if needed (for example if it locks up completely), and perform a lot of low-level administrative tasks or diagnostics that you’d normally need physical access for.
Redundant storage is also common, allowing the administrators to replace entire hard disks while the system is running, without it having any noticeable negative effects on the users that utilize the server.
A very typical difference is that servers will often have many weaker cores instead of a few very fast cores. One of the reasons for this is that if you have for example two users that each want to view a web page, it’ll take a lot less energy to do this if you have two cores at 2 GHz that each send one user a web page, than one core at 4 GHz serving both users, even if the task takes roughly the same time with both setups.
For this reason, servers very often have 20 or more cores each if they serve a lot of people. These 20-core CPUs would however not be very good at some of the tasks that are common for home users, such as web browsing or playing games, because it’s a lot harder for a game to make use of all 20 cores for a single game, than it is to have 20 almost entirely independent tasks evenly spread across 20 cores.
When you’re running dozens of servers that serve up pages 24/7, the lower power use both leads to lower electricity bills, and less heat output, which allows them to again spend less money on cooling down the server rooms.
Another thing to consider is that because these servers are built to both be extremely compact (because it costs money to rent the physical location you put them in, and you might need many of them) and to be installed in rooms where humans typically don’t spend a lot of time, very little effort (probably none at all) is put into making them quiet. Purpose-built servers can be extremely loud because they have a lot of very small fans that spin extremely fast to push air through the very dense internals of the server. You would not want to have one in your living room.
A server is essentially just a normal computer, it is just used for one specific function – storing data and connecting together multiple other computers so that this data can be shared between them.
For small scale stuff, this can be done with an absolutely standard computer with the appropriate software.
The difference appears when you start getting into the higher end and more demanding users – because servers have specific tasks, you can start to tailor the hardware to do that specifically, and skip out the components that are typically used for other tasks. So compared to a machine dedicated for gaming, there won’t be the same demand for a graphics card, but you may want a better processor and more ram to better cope with lots of data being distributed to different places.
You can also note that serves trend to be run continuously, and often don’t need constant physical access – so you can further tailor them by doing things like ensuring they have more reliable power supplies and cooling systems to cope with continual use, and redundant power supplies so they can be kept running in the event of a failure. This is easier to do if you don’t need to keep them as quiet, so at the same time you can do things like rack mounting them – putting them in a specific type of case that fits a standard rank housing, so you can then easily store multiple servers and other units in a dedicated location.
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