Xeon for gaming rig?

[J-Acito]

The company I work for is getting ready to auction off some of their computers. Mine is one of them. It is a Dell Precision T3500, X5550 Xeon, 3GB DDR3 1333MHz, 250GB HDD, NVidia Quadro FX580, Windows 7 Pro. I'm thinking of bidding around $300.

Thoughts?

p.s. I like games like Diablo 3, Far Cry 3, Thief, and WoW.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Nothing wrong with gaming on a Xeon. CPUs are as CPUs do.

The X5550 isn't exactly a weak CPU - it's about equivalent to an i7-920, which were very popular for enthusiast builds not too long ago.

It'd certainly be adequate for your games, although compared to a modern i3, it's giving up a lot on single-threaded performance. That will hurt you.

And the GPU's pretty weak.

To game the way you probably want to, a GPU and RAM upgrade are necessary at minimum.

Honestly, I'd have a hard time justifying that over something like this (after the upgrades to the Dell, price'd be about the same, prolly):

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/XQ9dJx

But if you do more heavily-multithreaded stuff (video encoding) and gaming is more of a side thing, there's a lot of teh sexxeh in the X5550.

 

[Burpo]

Don't get too carried away.. There were some brand new ones on ebay recently for under $300.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-T3500-...B2cjOS6eMteHFzhqENIJc%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

Still, it's a powerful PC, especially when you drop in a hex core CPU

Currently on ebay even cheaper for used..
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Precis...=100011&prg=11129&rk=2&rkt=10&sd=331318662958

 

[fire400]

save your cash.
...i would just go on craigslist and buy someone's old custom gaming rig for less than a few hundred dollars and get it done and over with.
that way, nearly everything is upgrade-able without cloning machine limitations like dell, hp, lenovo, etc.

p.s. dell and hp are not on chrome's default misspelled list if not capitalized, but either way, capitalize Lenovo or leave it lower cased, and I get the squiggly lines to correct it to "LENO" - explains how well google treats Chinese companies. google-bastards...