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6600GT w/ Dual Xeon 2Ghz

J

jvarszegi

Senior member
I want to play some newer games then my laptop's MR Radeon 9000 will support, but I'm probably not going to build a gaming machine (my first build) for a few months, until prices settle down and everything's actually available. 🙂 Not only that, but once I get the new machine, I plan to get my girlfriend to play some games with me, to see if she likes it.

With all that in mind, I just ordered a 6600GT for my older home workstation (it's coming with Doom 3, $208 at NewEgg). I should've asked opinions before I bought, but now it's done.

It's a dual-Xeon 2.0Ghz machine with a gig of RAM and one 40 and one 80-gig 7200 RPM IDE drive, and an 8x AGP interface (the E7505 chipset). What sort of performance can I expect from this setup? The card that's in there now is an older-model worstation-class Nvidia card with 64MB, which doesn't tackle too many games well as you'd expect. I was thinking about upgrading this machine, but there's lots of stuff already installed on it that we both find useful and the technology is just too out of date.

When I was out at NewEgg, I noticed some AGP cards being advertised as supporting PCIe. How does that work? Was it a typo? None of the 6800GT models seemed to have that, but I'm not planning to take this card to my new machine anyway.
 
I won't bump the thread again. I'm just mostly curious about what sort of effect two Xeon processors will have in games. Is it not going to offer much benefit? I'm not stupid enough to expect it to perform like a 4Ghz single processor, but it seems like lots of games would have to be multithreaded.
 
quite the opposite....basically NO games are multithreaded....your dual setup might even be slower than a single xeon because of the overhead involved with having 2 processors utilizing a shared bus.
 
How can that be? I mean, if you're playing a multiplayer game, some thread has to be handling all the I/O (at least one dedicated thread per I/O channel), the encoding/decoding of the stuff sent and received. I don't know anything about the rendering and stuff, but there it seems like coordinating the work of multiple processors might involve overhead so they might be written basically single-threaded.

Your response has me kind of unhappy, but it's almost what I expected. I'm hoping that the 6600GT will be pretty well matched with the processor. I figure that if it's bottlenecked somewhat in the processor, I can up the settings on graphics and still be pretty happy with it. I'm not about to run out and pick up one or two new Xeons just to fit this machine. 🙂 I'm hoping that the extra processor will at least take all the OS processing and whatnot out of the way, leaving one to just concentrate on the game. I don't know of a way to dedicate one processor to a program at the OS level; in Windows I think that the software itself has to support processor masking.

I'm not too worried about the bus on this one; IIRC the chipset has a dual channels for both memory and I/O. I am a complete idiot about this stuff, but that was supposedly a selling point of the board.

 
PCI-E is a different slot design than AGP -- based on the price you paid I'd guess you ordered a PCI-E card which you'll need to return.

Games are written for single processors because 99.9% of the game buyers only have a single CPU (hyper-htreading doesn't count), and writing thread-safe code is more difficult (so costs more in time and money).

Once dual-core CPUs become common in a few years, games will take advantage.
 
Originally posted by: klah
This article includes a few gaming benchmarks comparing single/dual Opterons and Xeons: http://www.techreport.com/revi...teron-x50/index.x?pg=1

The 2cpu system is always ~5% slower in gaming than the identical system with just 1 cpu installed.

In games your system will probably perform similarly to a P4-2.0A with DDR200, or a P3-1.4.
Click to expand...

OMFG, what an idiot I am sometimes. You're right. I got confused from looking at so many cards side by side.

Well, it looks like I now have a halfway decent card to start my new rig off with. You've got to crawl before you can walk... in my case, you have to flail around like an idiot for a bit before you can crawl. 🙂 It's probably best that I learn how to be careful before I go ordering everything else...
 
Well, I wound up getting a 6800 on sale for $200, unlocking and overclocking it, and got a 3415 on 3DMark05! Go figure. Now I'm wondering how my newer machine will stack up-- a 3500+ Winchester 1GB machine with a faster SATA drive and a 6600GT to start off. I've got almost all the pieces for that one, just waiting on the motherboard.
 
As everyone else has pointed out dual anything just won't cut it. know matter how large you memory( you could have 4 gig if your mb supports it ) not many games take full advantage of dual systems.
 
Originally posted by: KamiXkaze
As everyone else has pointed out
Click to expand...

Well, I imagine that you've never owned a dual-proc system, but as to what will or won't "cut it" for you I won't quibble. Earlier tonight I ran Doom 3 at medium settings at 1600 X 1200 perfectly smoothly, with AA and AF turned off. Tomorrow night I'll play with the settings and see how high the system can go. So far I think it's not bad for a $200 upgrade on a workstation with some mileage. I also like the fact that I can game and have other programs running at the same time on this machine.

Like I said, I'm not expecting super performance out of it, but a 3DMark05 score of 3415 seems respectable for a non-gaming rig. I know that that benchmark mostly stresses the GPU, but I also ran some other games on it, like Need For Speed Underground 2, at highest possible settings. That's cutting it enough for me, for now-- until my new socket 939 motherboard comes in the mail!

 
I have Dual xeons@2.5Ghz I will attest to the benefits of the Dual procs in gaming. Sure the Game may not run the fastest but there is something that just always feels snappier on my dual xeons than when I ran my athlonxp@2.0Ghz.
 
Well, I have one cpu to take care of everything but the game, SCSI to kick arse when loading/running the game, and one more cpu for the game. Doom3 or Farcry is no problem at all, even with 2 F@H and encoding going on at the same time.
 
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