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Mac Pro (early 2008) gaming performance?

H

Hotky

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 12, 2015
2
0
I recently got a Mac Pro 3,1 (Quad Core model) on eBay for around $300.
It includes an SSD, a GeForce GT 120 and 4GB of memory.
Do you think it will possible to run games like World of Warcraft or League of Legends on it?
And would it even be worth to upgrade the graphics card or is the old quad core CPU going to be the performance problem? It's a 2.8 GHz quad core Xeon.

I really only got it to use as a cheap server for my plex media center, but I kinda want to see if it's possible to get this thing upgraded and maybe run some games on it :D
 
I just finished downloading WoW (the thing is huge these days) on my 2.66 quad core with 8GB ram. This was with the stock GeForce 120. On lowest settings I am getting 17-80 FPS depending on where I look at 1920x1080. Its playable but not pleasant. But that should give you a base line idea, its certainly upgradable to better experience!
 
BigCanoe said:
I just finished downloading WoW (the thing is huge these days) on my 2.66 quad core with 8GB ram. This was with the stock GeForce 120. On lowest settings I am getting 17-80 FPS depending on where I look at 1920x1080. Its playable but not pleasant. But that should give you a base line idea, its certainly upgradable to better experience!
Click to expand...

Ok, that is a little disappointing ^^ I didn't know the GeForce 120 was that slow. But I'll probably look into getting a gtx 680 or maybe 970 if they announce a mac edition in the near future. I'm still a little worried about the CPU but I guess it should be fast enough to play games on medium settings if I upgrade the graphics card.
 
I played Crysis, Warhead, Crysis2, Starcraft 2, Orange Box, Bioshock 1/2 and Infinitie among others on the 3 Ghz 2008 Mac Pro. Mostly maxed out except Crysis 2. I used an ATI 5870 though.

I think a single processor in my model is roughly equivalent in performance to a Intel Extreme Quad Core QX9650 and there are two of them. It suffers single threaded performance on some more recent games and I suspect Starcraft II as well - I have noticed significant improvement in FPS on my new 4790K rig despite using the same GPU. Can't comment about wow etc since I don't have those.
 
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