James writes, "I know that the more memory you have the better performance you're going to get, so I was looking around at various components, and I noticed that Xenon-compatible motherboards support far more memory than the typical gaming computer motherboards. Should I build a Xenon based system to take advantage of that additional memory?"

If you're building a server then by alls means, go right ahead. On the other hand, if you're building a gaming system, then you're crazy.

While it would be nice to have the hundreds of gigabytes of memory that those server motherboards support, it wouldn't be nice to use the slower DDR2-800 memory that they tend to support. It also wouldn't be fun trying to use a consumer operating system on a Xenon server as those processors are built for slightly different tasks than what the average consumer uses their computers for.

So here's the problem: servers are built, mostly, around accessing and maintaining a database. Therefore most server systems are optimized for this one particular task - it's not a very performance demanding task, but it is resource demanding (ie, you need a lot of disk space and a lot of memory, but you really don't need a lot of processing power). Servers also, generally, don't need great graphics performance, so support for the high end video cards is usually thrown out the window.

Generally, the performance offered by a server platform is severely negated when you attempt to do consumer-related activities on it. Stick with the desktop market.

If you have a question send it over to lordkat@gmail.com

Be safe,
Jason