Running a dedicated games server

[BarryD]

Over time me and a few friends have gathered together enough spare pieces from upgrades to put together a reasonable pc as our dedicated server, however we're not really sure what kind of spec we'd need, we're on a 1mb/256k adsl line so it'll be nothing too large, just 5 or 6 of us at most. AT the moment we have a board that will take about up to an athlon 2200xp or so and running on 384mb's of sd 133mhz ram. We're not really sure what cpu we'd need or wether we need any more ram to run smoothly, we'd be playing things like ut2003 and halo online, but as mentioned, not with too many players, and most in our locality.
Any suggestions about what we'd need would be apreciated as we've never really run a server before, thanks.

PS, any idea what OS would work best for a small server with this spec, windows 2000, or server 2003 maybe?

[Sovereignty]

Since it sounds like you're on a budget, I recommend picking up an XP1800+ DLT3C from www.excaliberpc.com for under $80. You can overclock it to about 2.0ghz on default voltage and cooling without worry, which will definitely help.

You can try that and see how it works, but you're pretty limited by that ram and probably your board as well. If you're only looking to have a few people connected though, it will probably be very tolerable.