Dual Xeons and gaming?

[willlangford]

I am looking at getting a dual xeon workstation board. the 7505 intel chipset. how well does it do in gaming? and does the dual xeons show up at 4 procs in windows b/c of ht?

thanks,

~William

 

[aftermath]

if u use xp pro then u get 2 real and 2 vertual cpu if u want to use win2k u need a server version as it does not understand the diffrence between vertual and real cpus.
the xeon ssytem would, i expect be a beter gaming platform than myn and this is no light-weight, due to the beter memory bandwidth of the xeon.

 

[CCW]

Very few games are programmed to make use of Dual-Processors as they arent multi-threaded applications. Windows 200 doesnt officially support hyper-threading so Windows XP or .NET (2003) would be the only operating system you could use that would make proper use of the processors hyper-threading. This board would need an AGP graphics card slot which I presume it does if its a workstation board as these usually have them for CAD work, the server board usualy dont have AGP slots as servers do not need good graphics cards.

Craig

 

[Xaotic]

If you do get the e7505, do not get 400FSB Xeons. They will typically throttle the RAM to PC1600 from PC2100, unless the board has a BIOS that allows running the RAM at different speeds. I am happy with mine despite not having upgraded to 533FSB processors.

 

[Quailane]

A single 3.2Ghz P4 with 800mhz fsb and an 8x agp slot would really outperform a dual 3.2Ghz 533mhz fsb and they only have an agp 4x slot I think. Plus, the northbridge for the desktop system is more geared toward performance and you can overclock way better than the workstation's northbridge which is geared toward stability and less towards performance.

 

[dagamore]

Xaotic, you are right, but if you can only afford the 400 fsb, get them and later you can upgrade to the 3.06 533 chips and your ram will bump right back up, and it will not hurt the ram to under clock it for a while.

while the dual xeons will hsow up as 4 in XP pro (2 real and 2 virtual) in 2k server (any version) they will show up as 4 (but all 4 will be real, or at least the os will think so and miss schedule them) if you run XP pro you should not have any problems, and while alot of games right now will not get any performance boost, they may even take a slight (5-10%) hit (at most) from the duals, later games, i.e. the next year or so, more of them will be smp aware (or multi threaded to be exact) thanks to intels HT!


and you will fold with it right?