I recently picked up a system for use as a living room computer. It happens to be a Mac Pro that's rather long in the tooth. It's a single CPU model, featuring a Xeon X5680 which is functionally identical to an i7-980. The video card will need to fulfill two requirements: 1) it has to be an AMD card (MacOS doesn't like modern Nvidia GPUs) and 2) it can't require more than 2 x 6-pin PCIe power connectors. The other thing I'd like to avoid is getting something like a Radeon 5700 XT which would surely be bottlenecked by this old CPU.
I will be dual booting and using Windows to run games, not just Mac games. Though the processor is old, it is a 6-core hyperthreaded CPU at 3.3 GHz so it should be able to handle moderately demanding games. AFAIK, the Mac Pro cannot be overclocked, so that's not really an option.
EDIT: Budget is ... cheap as possible. $150 - $200 is what I'm thinking. I'm open to used or new parts.
I will be dual booting and using Windows to run games, not just Mac games. Though the processor is old, it is a 6-core hyperthreaded CPU at 3.3 GHz so it should be able to handle moderately demanding games. AFAIK, the Mac Pro cannot be overclocked, so that's not really an option.
EDIT: Budget is ... cheap as possible. $150 - $200 is what I'm thinking. I'm open to used or new parts.