Mac Pro 1,1 x5160 -> x5355 for gaming? X5365?

[slughead]

I have a spare stock mac pro 1,1 I have sitting around for gaming on occasion.

X5355 ( 4 core 2.66 ) have gone down in price, you can basically get 2 for less than $350 now.

My question is: For gaming, am I going to see any performance increase at all?

From what I've read, the answer is likely no, but I wanted to check.

Meanwhile the x5365 (4 core 3.0) is still expensive ( $650 - 700 for 2 ). I expect performance would be better with that one but maybe not worth the money.

Does anyone have any benchmarks or experience with gaming specifically with these processors?

 

[ElderBrE]

I would also be interested in knowing this since I am thinking about making a 5150 to 5355 swap but it might not be worth it for gaming, only for video.

Alternatively, a 5150 -> 5160 might be more interesting since those procs are quite cheap now.

 

[BigJohno]

Just look at your cpu activity when you game... If it's maxed out then yes you might see some improvement. Games are all dependent on video cards. My quad core is only taxed about 30-40% during Battlefield 3.

 

[InuNacho]

Yea, but you have a 2010 model, the OP is referring to the original 06 one.

 

[CaptainChunk]

My question is: For gaming, am I going to see any performance increase at all?

I would venture a guess that the answer is no. For gaming, you would see NO difference at all jumping to X5365s.

Only a handful of games can actually harness even quad-core power. You already effectively have a quad core machine; going to 8 cores wouldn't help your case for that type of usage, as the 4 (or in many cases, 6) additional cores would be idle the whole time anyway.

I would really only consider an X5365 swap if you frequently run applications (video encoding, rendering, scientific calculations, etc.) that can actually scale across 8 cores. Otherwise, you're really just wasting money. An X5355 swap would actually hurt gaming performance, because you'd be losing about 11% of your clock speed on the cores that would actually be used.

 

[ssgbryan]

I have a spare stock mac pro 1,1 I have sitting around for gaming on occasion.

X5355 ( 4 core 2.66 ) have gone down in price, you can basically get 2 for less than $350 now.

My question is: For gaming, am I going to see any performance increase at all?

From what I've read, the answer is likely no, but I wanted to check.

Meanwhile the x5365 (4 core 3.0) is still expensive ( $650 - 700 for 2 ). I expect performance would be better with that one but maybe not worth the money.

Does anyone have any benchmarks or experience with gaming specifically with these processors?

You can get a pair of X5355s right now for about $150. Going with x5365s would only add 400Mhz in clock speed for more than three times the price.

Gaming is driven by your video card. I'd look to upgrade there.