Hey guys,
I have been running a Intel E8400 dual core for far too long, and just picked up a server with a Xeon x3450 and 16gbs of memory. Seeing as its better then my current gaming computer, I would like to use it to game on, however it has a PCI-E x8 slot and a x4 slot, my GTX 570 wont fit either slots.
First question:
If I purchase something like this image to convert the x8 slot into a x16 slot and managed to secure and power the graphic card, would I have a performance loss by using the x8 slot or even a x4 slot?
Second question:
The E8400 at 3ghz has a single thread performance of 1252 according to CPU Benchmark.net, and the Xeon x3450 has a single thread rating of 1161 source, keeping in mind that im overclocked to 3.6ghz single thread performance will be higher then the base score. Would I be giving myself a bunch of trouble to use the server and end up getting a worse gaming experience by using less powerful cores but more of them?
Your input would greatly be appreciated 
You can totally use pci-e X8 for a gtx 570, even at gen 1 it should work.
Something like this would be more suited though http://eshop.sintech.cn/images/PA8018-logo.jpg
As for single thread it depends a lot on the game, but I wouldn't imagine it would be very good to game on.
Selling it for parts might be more worth it.
Some games will run fine with that though still, but games like witcher 3 or especially fallout 4 will eat that chip alive.
Small note, depending on which motherboard your E8400 system has you might be able to do a 771 cpu to 775 socket mod and put a core2quad xeon in there, maybe even overclock it.
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The graphic card's iv seen have a solid second section that is longer then a x8 slot, the picture you sent doesn't size up the slot, I don't understand how the graphic card would connect to the image you provided.
I wasn't aware of the ability to put a 771 CPU in a 775 socket, ill look into it and see if its possible with my motherboard.
As for selling the parts, do people still buy SAS controllers?
Your pci-e slot doesn't need to be x16 long as long as it is cut out on the end so larger cards can fit.
You could fit a gpu on a x1 slot even if the end is cut.
Wait... so that means I could just remove the bit blocking a graphic card from going into the x8 slot and skip the riser cable altogether. That's not too bad to test how it works for gaming.
You could do that if nothing gets in the way behind the pci-e slot, often workstation and server boards have lots of heatsinks and components behind that area.
Update: Just wanted to leave my experiences here for anyone in the future about to make my mistakes and waste their time.
I got the riser cable finally, had to update the bios because it wouldn't output video through the graphic card. While installing the driver the computer rebooted unexpectedly. After some head scratching I found out that the PCIe 2.0 on the motherboard has a cap of 25W, and the cap of the single 6pin power for the graphic card was 75W, but the 650 ti boost requires 150W. So now my 2 options are, rig a molex connector to the power on the PCIe riser cable, or give up and just use the server to gain some experience with FreeNAS and ZFS.
I am leaning heavily towards FreeNAS, I don't want to break anything that I could use.
Some word's of wisdom, this wouldn't have been a good desktop replacement anyway, It randomly freezes during pre-bios boot procedures, and rebooting does not fix it(you have to unplug it from the wall and wait a minute), the 15k rpm hard drives are like a million deg Celsius. It was quiet, although I never got the cpu hot. RAID card's are weird, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 and it just re-boot's before I get the windows boot logo. and it takes 5 Minutes to boot up with no exaggeration.
servers are different animals. : )
though in this case, i think your main problem is that the server is just too old, and possibly dying.
Poor guy.
He fell for the home server meme.
