I know this sounds weird. "Hey Aremis, you stupid git, why are you talking about keons when you like old big endian chips and pentium 4's?!" BECAUSE YOU SAUCEY PAMF THESE ARE STILL OLD MACHINES!! 10 to 11 years in fact.
So I have 2 of these machines now. 1 is a Dell Precision 670 that I rebuilt and the other is my "new" Mac Pro 1,1. I have talked about Varrock a lot in the 2 months I have been using him as my main machine and now I am off of Netburst completely with this mac pro. I don't have a name for it yet but it's in my mind somewhere.
These are the specs of the 1,1, as for Varrock consider him similar hardware wise but 1 generation behind in architecture.
2 X Xeon 5150's @ 2.66ghz (no HT as far as I am aware, nor boost clock, but that may change)
16 GB DDR2 PC2-5300F, whatever the fuck that is
My SSD and 1 TB HDD setup
ATM an ATi X1900 XT (I can sell this for a stupid amount of money) but it will be replaced by my R7 370
An airport card (it didn't have airport) ABGN
Dual FW 400/800
Dual gigabit lan
5X USB 2.0
4X PCIe X16
The system over all is stable as hell. Runs quiet until it heats up too much then the fans go full power until its decent again. This isn't a bug, thy actually did that originally as well. Now, over all these machines are actually pretty great. For the 160 USD spent on it the fact that nothing is wrong with it floors me. I'm certain that whatever I throw at it it will not have an issue and will definitely handle better than Varrock ever did game and recording wise. The wall is going to hit where it sortof counts when I will need 10.9 and its stuck at 10.7, though any version can be hacked to work with little effort. Ultimately this will run OSX, Linux, and Windows and unless something else comes along this will now be my main machine. I'm good with that.
Edit: Actually I was wrong here. In a hardware update to the machine that I found later on it actually WAS a bug. Since that update the fans work like you expect. However the machines I have seen/used before did also work like this so whether this is a problem between machines or all the machines did this I have no idea. Point is it doesn't go to 100 anymore. Doesn't do it quickly either.
Until I get around to doing HW testing I can only go over some loose specifics. I can say that for a machine like Varrock you won't have a great gaming experience because of the Pentium 4 age Xeons and their limited capacity. While solid, it was hard work o play something as simple as TF2, CSS, and this war of mine. NOT COOL.
I expect that with this Mac, The 1,1? I like the ring of that...... I expect that with The 1,1 I will have better performance over all and have a similar experience to my Phenom. Tests will be soon to come and I will have to report those at a later date when I have the time to do them. But for now, I have a 1,1 and I intend to use it.