Intel Pentium 4 (P4) HT vs Dual Intel 64-bit Dual Core Xeon 5130

nick777

Honorable
Dec 13, 2012
7
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10,510
Hi Everybody, really need your help. I'm looking to buy one of 2 refurbished systems.
Will be using them to design and play games (actually my son will!!!)http://img.tomshardware.com/forum/uk/icones/biggrin.gif

SPECIFICATION A

Dell Precision 380 Workstation
Intel Pentium 4 (P4) HT 3.8GHz=2 x 3.8GHZ
Memory: 4GB (4,096MB)
Hard Drive: 300GB
nVidia GeForce GT210 512MB 3D Gaming Graphics
Windows XP Professional

SPECIFICATION B

Processor: Dual Intel 64-bit Dual Core Xeon 5130 2.0Ghz =4 x 2.0GHz
2GB (4 x 512MB) PC2-5300F RAM
80GB SATA
ATi Radeon 2GB HD5450 gaming/professional Graphics Card
Windows XP Professional

I'm really interested to hear your responses. Which system would you pick and why?
I don't really know too much. The 1st system seems to have more ram, but the 2nd has
ram on the graphics card. I'm sure there's more important issues but don't know.

Thanks for any help.
Nick
 
The Intel® Xeon® 5130 use the same micro-architecture as the Intel Core 2 Duo family processors. I would take a single Intel Xeon 5130 over any Intel Pentium® 4 or Intel Pentium D processor we ever released.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
The Xeon should be much better but with only 2GB system RAM, you aren't going to be going anywhere. Most of the first GB gets eaten up by the OS and the remaining 1GB goes away quickly particularly if running IDE and debugging environments for "designing games". If you are seriously planning to use it for development, you might want to consider the cost of adding 2-4GB extra.

I personally would not bother with either refurb system if they cost more than $125 since I could get something 2-3X more powerful by throwing less than $200 worth of new parts into one of my existing boxes.
 

popeyejohnson

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Jul 5, 2012
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both of those systems are less powerful than an over ripe bannana, for designing games not even close to suitable (of course im assuming you mean pc games, they will handle monopoly fine!) seriously i dont think you could even load a recent game up on that p4 (no experience of xeons, but i know theyre server chips so probs not the correct tool for this job) fyi, i brought a nvidia 210 last year to repair a system with no onboard graphics, and lame doesnt even begin to cover it, how much are these rigs
?
 

nick777

Honorable
Dec 13, 2012
7
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10,510
Thanks for the feedback everybody.

Popeye, my son is ten years old and I'm not wealthy yet!
He just wants to load up something called cryengine,etc.
When i was his age i was reading comics.
 

nick777

Honorable
Dec 13, 2012
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10,510
Thanks Hafijur...just want to get started with something we can upgrade over time.
btw, 120 pounds, ebay charlescomputers
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator

Upgrading is a fine strategy when only one part of the system is hopelessly outdated at a time. If you start with something that is hopelessly lacking in every aspect off-the-bat, you will end up finding out that you want to replace just about everything prematurely and this will end up far expensive than if you had bought something more suitable to start from.

Since you will need to replace the motherboard at some point, you also need to factor in the cost of a new Win7/8 license if the system comes with an OEM license. That's an extra ~$100 down the drain when you eventually end up deciding to change the CPU/RAM/MoBo and this may happen much sooner than you think with either of your refurb PC options.

Intentionally buying a grossly under-powered system to "save money" sounds like an expensive mistake to me.