Can my Dual CPU computer handle gaming?

[Michael Mastronardi-1357740]

Hello Everybody,

I'm wondering if my computer right now could handle all the up to date games that are available currently. Right now, i have a dell Precision T7500. I know it's a workstation but the specs inside it are great for editing and such and i was wondering that if it could possibly take advantage of the 2 cpus inside of it to help me with gaming. Here are the specs, please let me know if you think it could run what i need it to.

CPU: 2 Intel Xeon Processors Quad Core 2.0 GHz

16 GB Ram

GPU: Needs to be upgraded, but i'm thinking of putting in an Nvidia GTX 650 or 660

 

[SNA3]

Hello Everybody,

I'm wondering if my computer right now could handle all the up to date games that are available currently. Right now, i have a dell Precision T7500. I know it's a workstation but the specs inside it are great for editing and such and i was wondering that if it could possibly take advantage of the 2 cpus inside of it to help me with gaming. Here are the specs, please let me know if you think it could run what i need it to.

CPU: 2 Intel Xeon Processors Quad Core 2.0 GHz

16 GB Ram

GPU: Needs to be upgraded, but i'm thinking of putting in an Nvidia GTX 650 or 660

ye it can handle gaming vey well . and if you choose a card get the GTX 760 nothing less.

 

[biopolar]

Xeon's are beastly :3.

Out of curiosity what GPU do you currently have?

 

[Michael Mastronardi-1357740]

It's an nvidia quadro 295 or something of that. It's without question not going to be able to work with what i want to play. But i figure simply upgrading the gpu will allow me to do what i need to.

 

[SNA3]

It's an nvidia quadro 295 or something of that. It's without question not going to be able to work with what i want to play. But i figure simply upgrading the gpu will allow me to do what i need to.

get the GTX 760 its for 250$

 

[MU_Engineer]

Hello Everybody,

I'm wondering if my computer right now could handle all the up to date games that are available currently. Right now, i have a dell Precision T7500. I know it's a workstation but the specs inside it are great for editing and such and i was wondering that if it could possibly take advantage of the 2 cpus inside of it to help me with gaming. Here are the specs, please let me know if you think it could run what i need it to.

CPU: 2 Intel Xeon Processors Quad Core 2.0 GHz

16 GB Ram

GPU: Needs to be upgraded, but i'm thinking of putting in an Nvidia GTX 650 or 660

That machine can be pretty formidable at gaming but not with anything near your current setup- a pair of Xeon E5504s and a 2008-era workstation GPU. The GPU needs upgraded for obvious reasons. The E5504s will be very mediocre at gaming as they are very crippled. They will perform somewhere roughly in the neighborhood of a Celeron or Pentium due to a low 2.0 GHz clock speed, no Turbo Boost, a small 4 MB L3 cache, a very slow DDR3-800 memory controller, a slot 4.8 GT/sec QPI link, and you also likely have high-latency registered server memory to boot.

You will want to upgrade to much faster LGA1366 CPUs and a current GPU. A pair of X-series quad or six core Xeons will perform very well backing up a modern GPU like the GTX660. You'd get higher framerates with something like an FX-8350 or an i5-4570K but not by a whole lot or enough to really matter. I'd bet in quite a few games the 2.0 GHz maximum clock speed and torpid IMC of the E5504s will put a pretty noticeable framerate cap on your gameplay. I am guessing that from experience with my old 2.0 GHz Opteron 6128s which also lacked any sort of turbo boost and was probably about as fast in games as your E5504s are. You'd do well to drop in an un-crippled and much faster X-series 5500 or 5600, depending on what generation and wattages your board will support. I replaced the 6128s with an Opteron 6234 which does have Turbo Core and gaming (and general system responsiveness) is quite a bit better.

 

[Michael Mastronardi-1357740]

Hello Everybody,

I'm wondering if my computer right now could handle all the up to date games that are available currently. Right now, i have a dell Precision T7500. I know it's a workstation but the specs inside it are great for editing and such and i was wondering that if it could possibly take advantage of the 2 cpus inside of it to help me with gaming. Here are the specs, please let me know if you think it could run what i need it to.

CPU: 2 Intel Xeon Processors Quad Core 2.0 GHz

16 GB Ram

GPU: Needs to be upgraded, but i'm thinking of putting in an Nvidia GTX 650 or 660

That machine can be pretty formidable at gaming but not with anything near your current setup- a pair of Xeon E5504s and a 2008-era workstation GPU. The GPU needs upgraded for obvious reasons. The E5504s will be very mediocre at gaming as they are very crippled. They will perform somewhere roughly in the neighborhood of a Celeron or Pentium due to a low 2.0 GHz clock speed, no Turbo Boost, a small 4 MB L3 cache, a very slow DDR3-800 memory controller, a slot 4.8 GT/sec QPI link, and you also likely have high-latency registered server memory to boot.

You will want to upgrade to much faster LGA1366 CPUs and a current GPU. A pair of X-series quad or six core Xeons will perform very well backing up a modern GPU like the GTX660. You'd get higher framerates with something like an FX-8350 or an i5-4570K but not by a whole lot or enough to really matter. I'd bet in quite a few games the 2.0 GHz maximum clock speed and torpid IMC of the E5504s will put a pretty noticeable framerate cap on your gameplay. I am guessing that from experience with my old 2.0 GHz Opteron 6128s which also lacked any sort of turbo boost and was probably about as fast in games as your E5504s are. You'd do well to drop in an un-crippled and much faster X-series 5500 or 5600, depending on what generation and wattages your board will support. I replaced the 6128s with an Opteron 6234 which does have Turbo Core and gaming (and general system responsiveness) is quite a bit better.

Thanks for the input. Just a couple of questions though. Did you have two Opteron's in your system at the time? And even if so, does it really even matter when gaming? Or when gaming will i simply use only 1 CPU? Also, even if i were to upgrade my cpu, I would need to replace BOTH CPU's , which sounds rather expensive. And what kind of framerate cap are we talking about here?

 

[SNA3]

Hello Everybody,

I'm wondering if my computer right now could handle all the up to date games that are available currently. Right now, i have a dell Precision T7500. I know it's a workstation but the specs inside it are great for editing and such and i was wondering that if it could possibly take advantage of the 2 cpus inside of it to help me with gaming. Here are the specs, please let me know if you think it could run what i need it to.

CPU: 2 Intel Xeon Processors Quad Core 2.0 GHz

16 GB Ram

GPU: Needs to be upgraded, but i'm thinking of putting in an Nvidia GTX 650 or 660

That machine can be pretty formidable at gaming but not with anything near your current setup- a pair of Xeon E5504s and a 2008-era workstation GPU. The GPU needs upgraded for obvious reasons. The E5504s will be very mediocre at gaming as they are very crippled. They will perform somewhere roughly in the neighborhood of a Celeron or Pentium due to a low 2.0 GHz clock speed, no Turbo Boost, a small 4 MB L3 cache, a very slow DDR3-800 memory controller, a slot 4.8 GT/sec QPI link, and you also likely have high-latency registered server memory to boot.

You will want to upgrade to much faster LGA1366 CPUs and a current GPU. A pair of X-series quad or six core Xeons will perform very well backing up a modern GPU like the GTX660. You'd get higher framerates with something like an FX-8350 or an i5-4570K but not by a whole lot or enough to really matter. I'd bet in quite a few games the 2.0 GHz maximum clock speed and torpid IMC of the E5504s will put a pretty noticeable framerate cap on your gameplay. I am guessing that from experience with my old 2.0 GHz Opteron 6128s which also lacked any sort of turbo boost and was probably about as fast in games as your E5504s are. You'd do well to drop in an un-crippled and much faster X-series 5500 or 5600, depending on what generation and wattages your board will support. I replaced the 6128s with an Opteron 6234 which does have Turbo Core and gaming (and general system responsiveness) is quite a bit better.

Thanks for the input. Just a couple of questions though. Did you have two Opteron's in your system at the time? And even if so, does it really even matter when gaming? Or when gaming will i simply use only 1 CPU? Also, even if i were to upgrade my cpu, I would need to replace BOTH CPU's , which sounds rather expensive. And what kind of framerate cap are we talking about here?

it will WOOOOOOOOOOORK

most games are GPU dependant ... just be sure to pick 760GTX or Better.

IT WILL WORK AND YOU WILL ENJOY IT

forget the technical stuff ..

I used a HD 7870 on a PENTIUM D dual cores and it WORKED

you just need 30 fps to play well ... 60 is Ideal ...

GET THE CARD .

 

[MU_Engineer]

Thanks for the input. Just a couple of questions though. Did you have two Opteron's in your system at the time?

I had two Opteron 6128s at the time, giving me a grand total of 16 cores at a maximum of 2.00 GHz. I was running eight 2 GB DDR3-1333 CL9 unbuffered ECC memory sticks at the time.

And even if so, does it really even matter when gaming? Or when gaming will i simply use only 1 CPU?

Having more than four cores is not terribly important for gaming at the present time. Look at the performance charts at the main part of the THG website. You see a big jump from two to four cores and then past four cores, little to no improvement. Once you have four or more cores, it really boils down to how fast each of the cores are. That's why the slightly higher-clocked quad-core i7s outrun the six-core i7s. If you have multiple 4+ core CPUs, only one CPU will really be used. Your games won't notice if a second one is installed or not.

Also, even if i were to upgrade my cpu, I would need to replace BOTH CPU's , which sounds rather expensive.

You do not need to replace both CPUs at once, but you will want to remove both old CPUs and only install the one new one if you do decide to upgrade one chip at a time. Many boards will not boot with two dissimilar CPUs. If it does boot, the faster CPU cripples itself to run identically to the slower one which you would not want to do.

You can boot and run just fine with one CPU. My current setup has only one CPU in a multiple socket board and it runs fine. You do just need to remember that you can't use all of your memory slots with only one CPU installed and you also may not be able to use all of your PCI Express slots either, depending on if you have two northbridges or only one. You would need to consult your manual for that particular information. My particular setup has two northbridges so half of my PCIe slots don't work with only one CPU installed, since there is no second CPU present to provide the HyperTransport link to the second northbridge. I can also only use the memory slots adjacent to the one populated socket. But other than those things not being active, it works perfectly.

And what kind of framerate cap are we talking about here?

Depends on the game and your GPU. I run Linux and games for it are not terribly graphically intensive. The toughest game I have played on the machine is Enemy Territory:Quake Wars and my GPU is an old GTS250. At 1920x1080 high quality, the 6128s pushed around 40 fps. The single 6234 averages around 65 fps with the same GPU and settings. Most of the games I play are much simpler such as the very fun but decidedly not very graphically intensive Cube 2: Sauerbraten. The 6128s would average around 170-180 fps at my larger monitor's full 2048x1152 resolution and the 6234 sits on the 200 fps cap all of the time unless a level is loading.