Hi there, and a kinda gaming rig question

[Nikolai_D]

Hi there, just discovered Phoronix for me. Although im already for some time in Linux already. Seems pretty much very interesting! Since relation / balance between a good software and hardware was always interesting to me. Which makes it a complete good package. And Phoronix seems like this relation oriented. Which is cool. Especially the Valves recent actions. Which brought me here. As it is being said sometimes "ice has shifted / moved". Looks like.

So the first interesting question ive got is. One friend of mine wanted to buy a new PC for his teenager. For around 6xx euro. And since my colleague "Net-Admin" was telling me the other day about his cool workstation HP wx9400 and how pretty cheap u can get it on ebay. I was like this is what i have to get for him! So i ordered one which had 2 x FX3700 512mb ddr3 in it. (also 16gig ram, view sas drives, and dual quad, but whatever). So what i was wondering is how good of a gaming PC this is? I have googled around and found that quadros aren like the best gaming cards around. But i saw also that u can actually install other optimised versions of drivers etc. to make it better. And i was thinking kind of it will anyway be better then mine video card (Intel GMA 950 with which i could play some games actually). But when i googled around to try and compare it for example to HD 5800 (which his friend has / 1gig ram). It looked by the statistics pretty different.

So what do u think are the 2 x FX3700 pretty good for some average gaming or is it more or less already outdated?

any tips are apreciated,
thanks in advance,
Nikolai

[RussianNeuroMancer]

According to wiki FX3700 uses same chip with 8800 GT/GTS. There is some benchmarks, but that fact your friend is probably going to use SLI (2 x FX3700 you said, right?) make it a little difficult to compare. SLI goesn't give double performance, it give you around 1.5x more performance than one GPU.

So what do u think are the 2 x FX3700 pretty good for some average gaming or is it more or less already outdated?

For Linux gaming, since there is no OpenGL4-only games yet, I think it's enough. Windows gaming is different story - now game developers make DirectX11-only games that just doesn't work on DX9/10 generation hardware, like FX3700.