Server as a desktop?

[JoeAllen]

Hey guys,
My Dad has just recently cleared his offices at work and I managed to get a server from there for free. It is a Fujitsu Primergy TX200 S3. (PRIMERGY TX200 S3 : Fujitsu Global) I was wondering if i'd be able to use this as a replacement for my current home pc (a Dell Dimension E520)? Would there be any advantages of this, for example speed?

[celegorm]

What kind of things were you planning on doing with the computer? And did you plan on installing anything other than a server OS on the system?

I don't know how xeons work for gaming. In theory it'd be good because those are powerful but my understanding is that the architecture is more focused to data delivery and processing, and not the calculations needed by a gaming machine. I tried doing a search to prove my understanding one way or the other and the best I found was this: Intel® Xeon® Processors Overview

That said, it would be great for photo/music editing or as word editor.

Also, I tend to find server OS's to be limiting when trying to do every day tasks until you disable a lot of the security checks (assuming Windows). I would highly recommend using an operating system not meant for serving if you plan on using it as a standard workstation.

[jmacavali]

Originally Posted by celegorm

What kind of things were you planning on doing with the computer? And did you plan on installing anything other than a server OS on the system?

I don't know how xeons work for gaming. In theory it'd be good because those are powerful but my understanding is that the architecture is more focused to data delivery and processing, and not the calculations needed by a gaming machine. I tried doing a search to prove my understanding one way or the other and the best I found was this: Intel® Xeon® Processors Overview

That said, it would be great for photo/music editing or as word editor.

Also, I tend to find server OS's to be limiting when trying to do every day tasks until you disable a lot of the security checks (assuming Windows). I would highly recommend using an operating system not meant for serving if you plan on using it as a standard workstation.

+1 to this.