Two Xeon processors and games

[bobafetthotmail]

I sometimes buy batches of used computers from companies to resell, and today someone called me and offered a deal.

He was offering some servers using the 5000-series chipset (vague, I don't know the full specifics atm), that supports two processors.

The processors installed atm are two Intel Xeon E5345.

Now, I looked at benchmarks about them and they are around half of most of the top ten CPUs apiece.
I doubt the score doubles if there are two processors of the same kind, but I really hope it does.

Also, assuming it has a PCIe 16x (the 5000X chipsets do, don't know if this is X or not), will games run well on a rig like this if I slap a good card on it? Or the fact there are two different processors prevents games from using the second's processing power, or somesuch? (like it was for older games designed for single cores when running on dual cores)

In the past all servers I found were too damn crappy to do anything else than what they were designed to do (sit in a server rack and do something boring 24/7), so I have little experience in re-purposing them.

Any thoughts?:sarc:

 

[Zepher]

The low end i3 2120 blows away one of those older xeons.
It's almost 4x more powerful per core than the Xeon.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

You sure? According to benchmarks that i3 isn't so much better than ONE of them (4000 vs 2860 points)

But anyway, that motherboard has TWO such xeon processors working together, not just one.

What I'm asking is the overall performance of both (and eventual issues) as none did benchmarks of both working together afaik.

Of course they won't rival top i7, but I was hoping they would rank somewhere between high i3 and low i5.

 

[Zepher]

Well, passmark shows 4200 for the i3, which equates to 2100 per core while the Xeon is 2800, so around 700 per core.
3x faster per core.
I guess you can try it and see, I've always been a fan of multi processor systems, had an old Pentium 2 450mhz dual processor machine back in the day.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

oh noes. Figured out how to use that benchmark site properly . They do have benchmarks for multi-processor setups (as most oldish xeon processors are mainly found in multiprocessor mobos, makes little sense not benchmarking them in multi-cpu setup).

And here it is, with 5962 points. If I just doubled the single processor's score it would be 5720, so it runs much better in tandem.

Looking at the list of high end CPUs, that score is better than quite a few low-end i7 and i5, the closest matches (a dozen of points more or less) are i7 940, i5-2310, and AMD Phenom II X6 1090T.

Looks good so far (it belongs in the power level where I eyeballed it). Any more thoughts on this?

3x faster per core.

You were nearly right. Still, that's somewhat meaningless to me.
Is it better to have less better cores or more (crappier) cores, for games?

 

[Zepher]

Depends on the game, if it can use more cores then the slightly faster dual setup would be better.
The only thing is, will the game see both processors to use all 8 cores.

I do notice that all 8 threads on my i7 get used when I play modern warfare 3 and battlefield 3.
Wat I don't know is how many threads are actually being used by the game since there are other services running on the computer.