I recently bought a HP ML350 G6 with 1 Xeon E5645, 36GB RAM and 4x 300GB sas drive.
I want to use it as A moderate gaming PC so i can play games like City skyline, CIV V and VI, Portal series Shadow of mordor on Ubuntu. And do a little virtulization for testing some of de linux distros.
My question is it worth upgrading or adding a extra CPU and with which one. That all for a Budged of around a 150 dollar. I do want to use a AMD Radeon HD 6950 that i have laying around.
Have any of you some advice. I am planning of using it for the next 3-5 years.
Skylines, CIV and Portal are pretty much single threaded.
A second CPU won´t do much. I would say load the games up and see how they run.
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I mean you can, but you won’t be able to hear anything but the server screaming under your desk.
Sell the thing for like 600 bucks and buy a system 76 laptop and call it good.
Obviously if you have the parts the plug the GPU in and does it have any GPU power connectors or will you have to use Molex adpaters. Quick look at the HP PDF shows a bus limit of PCI-E Gen 2.0 x8 so that may have an affect on the GPU but only testing will show. As already mentioned for gaming the 2nd CPU may not do much but use more power 
Possibly useful for multiple VMs.
Still fast enough, won’t notice it.
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Yeah I know that servers are loud, I want to see if I can install different fans that are more quite and still keep every thing cool.
Will a different cpu be worth putting in, for example the x5670 or x5675.
The higher clocks will certainly help with game performance. It depends on what you want to achieve and how the games run.
As I understood your OP, you have the machine on hand. I would suggest you launch the games you want to play and see how they perform.
When something is not to your liking, you can still throw money at the problem.
HAHAHA
good luck with that
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The easiest way might be to use a separate fan hub as the HP connectors will be slightly different but you could also splice them in.
Just having a quick search I noticed an article that described various HP servers having weird issues with non-HP drives as I know HP often write their own firmware to add features. Increased fan speed and false alarms being some of them worth keeping in mind.
I’ve always been around HP servers and sometimes use parts from them but yeah it’s usually the noise that’s stopped me from re-using whole systems for my own use
The PC works for now i won’t change the processor.
The fans are still a pain.
There were three fans in the server I already pulled one out, but when i try to take the other two out the server restarts it self and giving an error that is misses a fan.
Do any of you know how i can trick the server in thinking it has a fan? so I can replace them with a fan controller and more quieter fans
The fans are redundant (or at least with all 4 it is) as the server is designed to run on a minimum of 3. So running on less than that will usually cause the others to ramp up even further than normal or as you found, shut down to prevent overheating.
Your best bet is to just replace the fans (however this will mean re-terminating the fan connectors as the ML350 uses 5 pin fan headers) with something quieter. There is a guy who has done this surprisingly already with a nice little blog about it: Greg Hunter
I put the 3rd fan back and it is a lot quieter so the redundancy works.
Agreed, the X56** series is as good as this server will do, however the OP will need to confirm the MB/BIOS revision to be guarentied it will work. I think the earlier revisions could only support a X55** series CPU.
IMO the best CPU combination that is possible on this type of kit if you want to game as well as run VM’s is to get a pair of X5677 or X5687. These are the quad core CPU’s in this series but achieve the highest clockspeeds possible on boards that don’t allow any over-clocking; plus they have the same amout of cache as the 6 core CPU’s.
The X5690 is the daddy of the series with the same clock-speeds as the X5687 but was rare to find at a cheap price.
With regards to heatsinks/fans - the OP might find a bodge something but will likely struggle to get an off the shelf part to just fit. Doing this for the same generation HP Z800 workstations was bad enough - and they had the room for normal sized heatsink/fans.
I wish the OP luck.