If you want to do high end gaming, the Dell T3500/T5500/T7500 are not the way to go. Only one graphics card power plug with too little power for the piggier GPU cards. And the specs say 16x PCI-E compatible connector but only 8x PCI-E electrical signals and speed. Good for mid level gaming using graphics cards that suck only some of the power from a single connector (60 watts comes to mind but I don't know if that is the right number) -- high end cards want 2 power plugs and draw 150 to 200 watts or more.
Doesn't matter to me because a mid-level GPU card is good enough for work. I prefer to use the Quadro cards+firmware+drivers which get OpenGL rendering 100% right. The same silicon GFX cards+firmware+drivers get OpenGL/DirectX fast for games but take rendering short cuts which are not 100% right.
Many games are still hobbled by the speed of a single thread, so the Xeons in the workstations are not as good as quad i7s with higher clock speeds. For work, I need lots of ECC RAM and lots of cores to run virtual machines -- a faster top speed is nice but not essential.
But d*mn, the used 5 year old workstations are built like tanks and the bang-for-buck is amazing.
Doesn't matter to me because a mid-level GPU card is good enough for work. I prefer to use the Quadro cards+firmware+drivers which get OpenGL rendering 100% right. The same silicon GFX cards+firmware+drivers get OpenGL/DirectX fast for games but take rendering short cuts which are not 100% right.
Many games are still hobbled by the speed of a single thread, so the Xeons in the workstations are not as good as quad i7s with higher clock speeds. For work, I need lots of ECC RAM and lots of cores to run virtual machines -- a faster top speed is nice but not essential.
But d*mn, the used 5 year old workstations are built like tanks and the bang-for-buck is amazing.
/Rowebot