Gaming PC Using HP xw6600 Workstation

[RaviP12]

Hey there. I currently have a HP xw6600 workstation and I want to use it to make a gaming pc. I can change any parts. My question is about which parts I should get for a sub-£600 build, and also which parts I can keep in the PC. Currently there are no changes. Below is a site that lists all my parts:
https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-workstation-xw6600-quad-core-xeon-e5405-2ghz-2gb-ram-160gb-hdd-vista-business/specs/

 

[nvincent_08]

not an ideal processor to use for gaming, especially to play heavy new title games, mainly because of the processor that will bottleneck a lot if paired with high end components. i suggest you to just build a custom desktop pc for gaming

 

[RaviP12]

Could I replace the CPU

 

[nvincent_08]

Could I replace the CPU

you can but it is not really beneficial and cpus with lga 771 were mostly xeon processor and they are really inefficient with power, especially the ram speed support is pretty bad

 

[RaviP12]

Could I replace the CPU

you can but it is not really beneficial and cpus with lga 771 were mostly xeon processor and they are really inefficient with power, especially the ram speed support is pretty bad

So I would also have to replace the motherboard. I don't mind how much I have to replace I just want to keep the shell to give it that old-school look

 

[nvincent_08]

yeah if you want to upgrade the processor that has different socket, can you maybe specify what are you going to use it mainly for and maybe budget limit and preferences? i can probably recommend you parts for the build

 

[william p]

I'm not seeing CPUs beyond E5450 on that, and the FBDIMM memory that 2x CPU LGA771 used is very bad for gaming.
http://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-xw6600-Workstation/318
Aside from being slower DDR2 it has a controller on each module which adds a lot of latency. It doesn't seem to support the faster XEONs like X5470 so it's pretty limited. 2xCPU support isn't much use for gaming. Very few games will use over 4 cores. Any that do will probably choke on the speed of the CPU and and RAM. You might be better off starting with a newer workstation. The Z400 if your committed to HP, or the Dell T3500 would be better. They support 4 ,and 6 core Westemere 32nm CPUs and DDR3 RAM in 3 channel mode.
W3680,W3690 with 12-24GB DDR3 1333 Ram (3x4GB,8GB) and put the rest of your budget into the GPU.
Other CPUs are the X5687 4 core, and the X5680,X5690 6 cores. They all support Hyper Threading so they can VM as well as your older SMP machine.
You can look at the performance numbers here. The first examples of each are overclocked to 4GHz with unlocked CPUs.
http://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-Z400-Workstation/67
http://www.userbenchmark.com/System/Dell-Precision-WorkStation-T3500--/2522