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View Full Version : Workstation vs Gaming hardware?



heyaz
07-02-2008, 03:29 PM
I'm looking to do a 5 box setup with 1 or 2 physical machines (preferably one). I'm just running on a couple of laptops at the moment with low video settings, but once I get serious I'll be building a real machine.

I'm not a big hardware guy and I'm pricing some machines on Dell and I'm curious to know if anyone has experience using business workstations for gaming (especially boxing) as opposed to home gaming desktops.

As far as price, workstations are pretty competitive I guess because it's a different market. The difference I noticed is that they use server grade hardware - Xeons, ECC Ram, SAS hard drives, and different types of video cards (nVidia Quadros). Also looks like you can configure them with a hell of a lot more RAM (8-128GB). I know these are mainly for business use - programming, video and image editing, etc, but it seems they would also have the power to run something like wow.

I would do work on the machine as well, apps like vmware, visual studio, photoshop, etc, which is pretty taxing on home desktop hardware in general. Does anyone have experience with this hardware and know how it would compare to gaming hardware for running WoW?

Thanks