LGA1155: E3-1230V2 or 3770 for gaming

nbrikha

Honorable
Jun 19, 2013
21
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I might have the chance to pick up an LGA1155 motherboard so I can upgrade from the AMD 8350 I have and get some stronger single thread action going on in my rig. Not that it's a slouch, but I'm tired of having lower fps and benchmarks because of my AMD processor. So I was going for the standard look of a 3770 but I saw the E3-1230V2 for 200 bucks at microcenter! I did some digging and found out that minus the onboard graphics and lower power consumption, the xeon is pretty much the same thing.

My question is simple. I don't need to overclock, I've never had any luck with it so I don't even want to mess with it. Short of that, will the Xeon E3-1230V2 perform on par with the 3770?

 
Solution
Solution
Aug 15, 2013
257
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10,810
Considering you don't want to overclock, the i7 3770 and xeon e3-1230v2 are for all intents the same processor (less 100MHz clock rate on the xeon). The xeon e3 1230v2 will work in most consumer grade motherboards as well as server grade LGA1155 motherboards, however I recommend you contact your motherboard manufacturer to make sure the xeon will work on your specific motherboard.

In comparison to an i5-3570, the xeon has a 3.3GHz clock speed vs 3.4, but it has a lower TDP and hyper threading at the cost of not having an iGPU. You can also use ECC memory with the xeon even though there's no reason to do so.