Always wondered while I was supporting 8-way SQL servers at BofA how a server would work as an AH game PC. Guess Xeon processors have come a long way from processing BofA ATM transactions nation wide.
For all intents and purposes the Xeon E3 1231 V3 is a Core I7 4790 minus the APU downclocked to 4770 speed, with ECC support, and all for about about 2/3 the cost .
Not just slightly. HiTech has an NVidia GTX 660 with 2GB of video RAM and is running Windows 7 64 bit. Huge difference between 32 bit Windows XP and an NVidia 8800GT.
Just for reference, our base video card is the NVidia 9800GTX which is a bit faster than the 8800GT.
The 8800GT would have to have all the graphic goodies disabled and lower the texture size as well, and it might be playable then, but Windows XP 32 bit could be a problem with resources.
Just saying.
I think the biggest problem with the 8800gt is the memory. It only has a half gig. While it's fast enough to push most games even modern ones with details turned down it makes High Def (1080p) stutter. It will push Alpha at the lowest settings but not without problems. Anything below 512 textures makes some text like the frame rate counter unreadable. However performance starts to drop off at 512 and higher (admittedly I haven't actually tried anything higher than 512 yet). Multi monitor set up may be an issue to, even when present but not used for gaming.
Alpha As is it's playable at 1920x1200 with all the graphic settings turned down to min and 512 textures. 256 textures give it a boost but again text starts to become unreadable at 128 it is completely unreadable.
This system is going to goto my son but I plan on keeping AHII and AH Alpha on it for testing, let me know if you need information (logs settings etc) from me.
I also have a laptop with a Core I3 3120m integrated hd4000 graphics 6gb system mem and windows 10 home 64bit. But I don't expect it to preform much better if at all - It tends to get lower frame rates than my desktop does.
For some reason the tower always seems to get the worse frame rates.