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Vista 64 might be a better gaming choice at this point. The early performance gap with XP has been closed with later driver releases, and it seems likely all your real productive work would be in OSX, so issues like driver support for older or more obscure peripherals are non-issues. Vista should, at least at some level, see 8 cores and more; XP would also in flavors above Pro (Corporate and Datacenter flavors scaled to 32 cores IIRC, tho these days Server 2003 would be choice there. Altivec could better speak to that). XP can 'see' at most a little over 3GBs RAM, and then only under certain circumstances... realistically, tho, your biggest bottleneck in gaming will be that 8600 GT (which is a part which will likely die prematurely anyway), so that's where first upgrade money should go, with the exception of student discounts for Vista.

No current PC games benefit from more than four cores (tho that will start to change at some point) so that needn't be a major consideration at present. Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit in OEM flavor would likely be a good choice; Newegg currently has it for $100.

2GBs RAM vs. 4 is a bigger bottleneck than support for more than 4 cores.

XP SP3 has a few benefits like Black Hole Router Detection that can benefit Net gaming somewhat, but its biggest benefit is in rolling up 4 years of Updates into one package. You might want to look at this thread.

One of my co-workers upgraded to Vista (he's the only one) and noticed a huge slowdown. At the time he had 2 GB of RAM and it was chugging just running visual studio. Once he upgraded to 64 bit Vista and added more RAM, though, it's been a lot better. YMMV, but I doubt it will give you a large enough performance increase to justify the hassle.

I think he mistyped - you can't get a 8600 in a Mac Pro. It's probably a 8800GT but could be a Radeon 2600XT.

In my opinion upgrading to Vista will not get you any more performance - if games aren't crashing due to running out of RAM (eg. Supreme Commander using more than 2GB) then there'll be no benefit to.

Coxy's right, it is an 8800 GT, I don't know why I thought it was an 8600...

Right now I'm plying Neverwinter Nights 2, which I realize isn't bleeding edge. Upcoming titles on my list are Diablo 3, Stacraft 2, Fallout 3, and possibly Too Human if it ends up making it to PC. Anyway, I was looking at that RAM as a vast untapped resource and I can get Vista cheap since I teach at a college but if you say the graphics card will choke games before memory will then I won't bother upgrading right now.

Thanks, guys. Sorry for the post-and-run, busy day today.

I'm kinda mixed on Vista atm. I can see it needs more RAM for sure, but performance isn't as bad as I thought. Closest example I can give is say...when OSX was first released. However in this case, its not like then where OS9 apps were kicking it's ass. XP and Vista gap is not as wide.

With the specs you have, you might enjoy it. I can't say as i've only got 2GB of RAM here for my main rig. I do have a laptop around here running it with 3GB but its only Vista 32bit and the GPU isn't as great.

But give or take if I had all the upgrades I wanted, pending any compatibility issues, i'd probably use Vista more.