Will a Xeon E5-2630 v2 double for Gaming/Workstation?

[JWatson]

Situation:
A friend wants to give me his workstation that he no longer use and I'm wondering if this would suit my needs to replace both my current gaming desktop and test workstation I use for VM labs to save space and electricity.

Current Setup:

• Gaming Rig: i5-2500K 4.1GHz, 16GB DDR3 1600, AMD 7970HD, 256GB SSD, 4x 2TB HDD.

• Test Workstation: Q9650 3.0GHz, 8GB DDR3 1333, AMD 5770HD, 2x 256GB SSD, 2x 640GB HDD.

Replacement Setup:

• Replacement Rig: E5-2630v2 2.6GHz, 32GB DDR3 1600 ECC, NVIDIA Quadro K620, 512GB SSD.

Thoughts/Concerns:
I know the 2630v2 will be much better for VM testing and lab development, given it's hex core and has 32GB of RAM but I wonder if it can also double as my gaming rig so I can just have one desktop to maintain by throwing in my 7970HD and my other hard drives.

The only concern is that the top turbo speed of the 2630v2 is 3.1GHz, and I'm not sure that will be slower than my existing i5-2500K @ 4.1GHz making general tasks be slower and/or impacting overall FPS average when gaming.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
JWatson

 

[jhu]

Your friend is giving you a hexcore Xeon machine? I need friends like this…

The only true way to tell if performance is acceptable is to actually try it. So let us know how it goes.

 

[Burpo]

Xeon has adequate single thread performance..
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2630+v2+@+2.60GHz
but the i5 does beat it..
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-2500K+@+3.30GHz

Like jhu says, only way to know is try it..

And I wish I had friends like that too

 

[Blain]

It should be good enough after you install the 7970HD.

 

[JWatson]

Thanks for the input!

My friend is giving it to me since he upgraded to a newer workstation after the motherboard went up in smoke. It still has a year of warranty so I'm currently RMA-ing the motherboard back to Asus (P9X79 WS). Thankfully the CPU, RAM, and PSU are still working. However, the case wiring got some damage/burn from the motherboard so I'm going to replace that.

I just want to make sure it was worth my time and money to replace my existing two computers with just one. That would be ideal

 

[JWatson]

Update:
Finally got the machine up and running after having to buy a different motherboard as ASUS does not warranty any motherboard with damage (even if due to faulty MOSFET chips). Now the computer is up and running and it runs better than I imaged. Gaming is as good if not better than my previous computer. I still need to setup the VMware lab, but so far it's promising.

Thanks again to everyone with the input.