Perfect Hardware for Gaming?

[aquinn]

hi guys, i'm wanting to buy a new MacPro... to use for day-trading, but also for serious gaming (PC games via BootCamp).
Although I'm willing to spend whatever money it takes on hardware to get the best possible gaming experience, I don't want to waste money on any hardware that won't translate into a noticeable increase in gaming performance.
Also, i'll be using it with a seamless triple-monitor setup (each with 1600 x 1200 res).

questions:
1. Would a 12-core 2.93GHz processor give noticeably better gaming performance than, say, a 6-core 3.33GHz processor, or an 8-core 2.4GHz processor?
2. Would 64GB of RAM make a noticeable difference from 32GB?
3. Someone told me that a RAID card would benefit gaming performance, but i find this very hard to believe - is this true?
4. Twin ATI Radeon HD 7550 .... will these give good enough performance for gaming across triple monitors (with a TOTAL res of 4800 x 1200)?

Any advice is appreciated... bearing in mind that it needs to cope with today's games as well as games coming out in the next year or two (which will obviously be more demanding in terms of hardware)

 

[slaptopsreview]

1. There's not actually a 12-core 2.93GHz processor, it's two 6-cores. Anyway, no, that would get you worse performance compared to a 3.33GHz 6-core. Games are finally just now starting to use 2 or 4 cores to some degree; anything beyond that is pointless for gaming, and you don't want to degrade MHz performance in favor of cores (assuming the same CPU architecture). There are some specific apps that scale well across many cores, but not games.

2. No. Adding RAM does not speed a computer up. The only time RAM has any effect on performance is if you have too little, so stuff is being swapped out to the hard drive. If you have 4GB, that will never happen while playing any game I know of, so there's no point getting more unless you need it for things like high-end video editing.

3. No, the hard drive setup can only have an effect on I/O speed, and I don't know of any games that constantly read from disk.

4. A bit ironic that you'd consider cheaping out on the one thing that actually has a big effect on gaming performance.... No, an old card like that will not work at all (especially since there's no Mac version I'm aware of, and it's from the AGP era, so it wouldn't even physically connect). You need to get the best graphics card you can, which currently is the Radeon 5870..

hope this helps u..