Hello, i am building a new system for myself and a friend. my friend has it set in his mind that he wants a dual cpu soultion, i myself was toying with the idea of building a Xeon box for my new comp. skull trail was sort of a flop and i want to go with i7 tech anyway. i was looking at boards and i know in the past server boards have alwas had a bottle neck when it came to memory as it has been much slower thain single cpu 'gaming' systems. i found that many new board run ddr3 at 1333 and have multipul pcie lines, this has changed alot from the last time i looked into this many years ago. I was looking at the following board: http://www.supermicro.com/products [...] DAH+-F.cfm if i used this board i would be looking to run a quad sli or crossfire system with dual Xeon's and around 24GB of ram, perhaps more.
i myself do a lot of 3d molding and photo work while my friend just wants a system for bragging rights. price isn't really a large issue so long as we keep each system below 5 or 6K.
my question to you all is, have any of you built a server to run as a gaming system? and what issues might you expect to run into doing so?
While server systems today can be built to run games exceptionally well....I guess short and sweet the point I am trying to make is that for less than a $1500, you can build a system that will run any game as fast or faster than your 5 grand server system.
3D modeling is a different story as apache_lives pointed out.