Which of these would be better for playing games?

Yes, but the CPU will not amount to much if your GPU is crap.

Depends on the graphics card, and on how the game is programmed.

Many things factor into performance. For gaming, RAM and graphics cards are crucial. Also, having more cores may not help much, because the code has to be specially engineered to take advantage of them. Code written for multiple processors is a total nightmare, and every programming book/tutorial/teacher/etc. will tell you to do everything you can to optimize performance first before writing concurrent code. Because of this, more cores often dosent mean significantly better performance because the game might not have concurrent code that takes advantage of the extra cores.

You may be better off with the 2 core machine, and applying the extra money for better ram and graphics. The performance difference between each option would vary based on the code of any particular game.

Something’s going to bottleneck here, it’s just a question of what you want to be your bottleneck. If you upgrade your GPU and not your CPU it’ll be that dual core that stops you from playing a lot, and if you upgrade the CPU your GPU will hold it all back.

That being said, I’d upgrade the CPU. A Xeon isn’t really meant for playing games at all, but it’ll probably be quite a bit more futureproof than upgrading your GPU and leaving the Pentium in.

Your processor is plenty powerful for playing most games. Your problem is elsewhere… What graphics card do you have? How much ram do you have?

@HungryGuy It’s this, so I really doubt that that is the problem, I try need for speed hot purrsuit reloaded and the computer barely runs at all.

I also have 3 igs of ram.

You also should update your graphic card drivers. For example, NFS Shift 2 ran like shit until I installed the newest beta drivers.

@XOIIO Jeez, don’t upgrade that thing. The 260 is a perfectly competent card still.

@ragingloli Yup, it’s all up to date, it’s just that the game lags while you play so you can barely do anything.

@DeanV Yeah, I got it for $50 on kijiji local ebay kinda thing, however there are some locally that have 3 outputs, lowest one I think is $225 or so.

Definitely look into graphics cards. Check the minimum requirements on the back of the game box and see if your specs meet or surpass them. Additionally, I seem to recall some games having a preference for one category of video card over another, numbers notwithstanding.

Well the 225 one is pretty nice, 810 mhz, i think 1 gig of ddr5, i’m at a draw between buying this one, or wiating another 2 weeks and getting one closer to $400

I have a gtx285, and hot pursuit runs fine on it.

@ragingloli What’s your processor though? And my pc is a dell xps600 desktop so it is fairly old.

@XOIIO I looked up the game’s specs, and it looks like the bottleneck might be either the processor (the source favors a dual-core, and I suspect that some programmers may not be thinking of the contingency where there’s a single, more powerful processor) or possibly an overall incompatibility with the graphics card (since they specify the main series and say nothing about the GTX series).

@Nullo Well I want to switch over anyways, since the HP is made for video editing and whatnot, it will work better, and is generally better than the XPS, I’m just hoping to sell some stuff so I can get a better vid card, and maybe a couple 1tb hard drives. Ram too.

@XOIIO intel core2 quad q6600