Gaming on a Workstation PC? Why not?

About an year ago I bought a second hand Dell Precision t5500 Workstation. I managed to buy it at a very good price and it's specs are very good, compared to PC's that I could have built or bought for the same price.

Dell T5500

I was largely concerned about the performance of my new workstation when it came to gaming. It came with a Nvidia Quadro 4000, 2Gb DDR5. Not the best card for the newest titles. Of course, you could play CS:GO on 150fps on 1080p, and other games such as LoL, WoW, Dota 2, 0AD were definitely not a problem. However, games like Battlefield 4 (Even Battlefield 3), Far Cry 4/3, GTA 5 were only playable at a solid 40 on low. Not ideal for a gamer.

It was this spring that I decided on upgrading my video card, since it was the only factor, holding back my workstation PC from being a beast. I must admit that I was really concerned about upgrading parts in a workstation. Is the power supply good enough? Will the PCI-E x16 2.0 slow it down? Will the motherboard support it? Will I open a whole in the universe and suck in the whole world? No, actually I just plugged in the new card, booted up and there it was - my own gaming pc. However, I decided on temporarily upgrading it to a mid-range Nvidia GTX 960. When the RX 480 and the GTX 10 series becomes available, I will upgrade again, for ultimate performance.
But is an upgrade needed so soon? Right now I can play any game without any problems with my FPS. Most are on ultra settings, some I have to put to high or a mix between high and medium. Only thing that seems to choke the GTX 960 is the anti-aliasing. I must also say that the 960 is pretty good for video editing, too. I benchmarked it with cinebench and the results are amazing!

Bottom line is, there is nothing standing in your way if you want to upgrade your workstation PC. Just check if the power supply you have is strong enough and if not, upgrade it, too. I can't speak for all workstations, but most are fully upgradable. Mine has the option to even add another processor and I can upgrade RAM to 32 Gb, but, of course, both of those are not needed when it comes to gaming. I am happy to say that my build is good for both gaming and rendering, something not many gaming-only PC owners can brag about!

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Thank you! - Sophex