OT - general game performance on Cedega/wine

[Ed Kolis]

Figured this would be a good place to ask, what with the concentration of technical knowledge - I'm considering replacing my laptop with a much faster desktop system, and I'd like to run Linux on the desktop... but one of the reasons I want a faster system is to play games on! So, does anyone have a general idea of how games tend to perform when run under Cedega or wine as compared to under Windows natively? The computer I'm looking at comes with Windows preloaded, but I've really been moving in the direction of open-source lately (you should see my cygwin folder, it's growing like santa the night before christmas on that rudolph special ) and I'd like to avoid dual-booting if possible, so I'd prefer to run the games emulated, even if they are slightly slower that way, just so I don't have to mess with 2 OS's on my machine, one for games and one for everything else. BTW, the games I'm talking about here are fairly recent, and most of them run at least marginally on my laptop. (X2: The Threat pretty much stresses my system out to the max, while WarCraft 3 runs just fine and UT 2004 is choppy on the larger levels, even at low resolution.) I don't have a LOT of money to throw away on an UBER LEET gaming system (hey, I'm in college ), nor would I want to (I can upgrade down the road, unlike with a laptop) but I can get significant discounts from Dell (see previous comment) and I am serious about this, so I'm looking at so I'm looking at around $1100+tax for a 3GHZ P4/ 160GB HD / 512MB RAM (though I might go with 1GB) / 128MB ATI video / whatever other specs you want to know system (including 17" LCD monitor ). I know I could probably save money by building my own system but that means I'd have to dig up all the parts compatibility lists and I'm not a hardware geek!
And of course the biggie is, Space Empires 5! David, now that the beta is nearing and the game should presumably be almost up and running, could you shed a little light on how well it runs on Cedega and/or wine? Could never hurt to have another tidbit of information
Thanks for the advice!
(If all else fails, I'll just leave Windows a LITTLE NTFS partition to run off of, store my games on a FAT32 partition, and put everything else under a set of Linux partitions... and if you're wondering where I'm gonna get $1100+tax from, I do have a brother who's interested in buying my laptop, which helps out in the money department If you're wondering WHY I want to do this, well, I want to escape from Microsoft and start using more open source software, yet still be able to play computer games! )