Space-Node's Canada region (Beauharnois, Quebec) runs two different processors depending on the tier: an Intel Xeon E-2274G on budget plans, and an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X on premium plans. Players sometimes ask why the two tiers are not just "the same CPU, less RAM." Here is the actual hardware difference and what it means for your server.
The specs, side by side
| Xeon E-2274G (Budget) | Ryzen 7 9700X (Premium) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cores / Threads | 4 / 8 | 8 / 16 |
| Base clock | 4.0 GHz | 3.8 GHz |
| Boost clock | 4.9 GHz | 5.5 GHz |
| L3 cache | 8 MB | 32 MB |
| Architecture | Coffee Lake (14nm) | Zen 5 (4nm) |
| ECC memory | Supported | Not applicable (DDR5) |
Why the Xeon is still in the budget tier
The E-2274G is an older chip, first released in 2019, but it is not a weak one. A 4.0 GHz base clock with ECC memory support makes it a genuinely stable, predictable workhorse for smaller game servers, budget VPS instances, and workloads that do not need more than a few cores at once. It has been reliable enough in Space-Node's Canada budget tier that there has been no operational reason to replace it.
Why the Ryzen is the premium pick
Most game servers, Minecraft included, lean heavily on single-thread performance for the main server tick. The 9700X's 5.5 GHz boost clock and Zen 5 architecture push more instructions through that single critical thread than the older Xeon can, and the 32MB of L3 cache (4x the Xeon's 8MB) means far fewer cache misses on the kind of scattered memory access patterns a modpack or a busy plugin server generates. The extra cores and threads also give more headroom for running multiple services, backups, or heavier plugin stacks without contention.
Which one should you pick?
- Xeon E-2274G (Budget): Small survival or vanilla-adjacent servers, a handful of concurrent players, light plugin lists, testing a new project before committing to a bigger plan.
- Ryzen 7 9700X (Premium): Modpacks (ATM10 and similar), higher player counts, plugin-heavy Paper servers, or anything where tick time under load actually matters.
This is the same logic Space-Node applies across every region. In the Netherlands, the budget tier runs a Ryzen 9 3900X while premium runs a Ryzen 9 9950X, same idea: an older but solid chip on budget, current-generation silicon where performance is the point.