Quad Core Xeon's for Games Rig?

[merango]

Hi,

I’m new to this forum but have been a fan of the site for many years. The reason for posting is that I’m stuck on a technical CPU question. Intel has swamped the market with all these new names for CPU’s and to be honest I’m a bit lost now with what is fast, faster and fastest on the market.

I have a test PC to use at home for software testing, but not sure if it would run my XP games as a dual boot PC for Home / office?at home

I wanted to dual boot it with XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate to learn the new OS and play with Media Centre and do the odd bit of work 😀

So the questions I have is:

The Works PC’s is a Dual Quad Core Xeon X5355 (2.66Ghz 1333Mhz 2x4MB Cache) with a 1KW PSU and 2 x 160GB (10,000 RPM) disks.

I am looking to put XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate - XP for games and other software I’d use at home, Vista for Media Centre and Office etc.

What I’m asking is would the Intel Xeon’s run XP fine and would they also run all the current Games and future games in the next year or so? I’d be putting in my 8800 GTX so the graphics should be ok.

I hear games down the road will be written for Dual and Quad cores but not sure where Xeon’s fit into it as a games rig.

Any help or advice would be great.

Cheers

 

[Turas]

I am running a Dual 5360 at home and its handles games just fine. I was originally running XP x64 and have switched to Vista x64 ultimate and it runs both OS's fine. I only play a handful of things like WOW, Madden, C&C. Since the xeons use the FBD Ram it is not quite as fastest ram out there but it still should be fine. I upgraded to a 2900XT on mine from a 1900XT so that it can handle more but in the end I wish i had waited until it was truly needed as it did not seem to give me that much more, at least in the games i play.