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Hetzner AX52 vs OVH Rise-3: which dedicated box wins on $/perf?

Two of the cheapest mid-tier dedicated servers in Europe, head-to-head over a 30-day rental.

Tobias 9 min read 8.2
  • dedicated
  • comparison
  • hetzner
  • ovh
  • europe

Both providers pitch the AX52 and the Rise-3 as the entry-tier “real server” — Ryzen-class CPU, NVMe storage, generous bandwidth. We rented both for 30 days and ran the same playbook against each.

Headline numbers

Hetzner’s AX52 (Ryzen 7 7700, 64GB DDR5, 2×1TB NVMe) lands at €54/mo plus a one-time setup. OVH’s Rise-3 (Ryzen 5 5600X, 32GB DDR4, 2×512GB NVMe) is closer to €60/mo with no setup but slightly worse single-thread.

On sysbench cpu Hetzner edges OVH by about 18%. On fio random-read the gap is closer to 4%. Network jitter to a fixed European endpoint was within margin of error.

The intangibles

OVH’s KVM is more polished — IPMI access, post-install scripts, and a saner DDoS posture. Hetzner’s robot.your-server.de feels like 2014, but support tickets close inside 30 minutes on average.

If you want the cheapest perf-per-euro, AX52. If you want a managed-feel control panel, Rise-3. Most workloads should pick AX52 and not look back.

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