Nobody is talking about getting an expensive server board here. Those Xeons fit into the exactly same boards as regular Core i7's. Unless the situation that you described in which you had to pay a fortune in gold and silver for your server-CPU solution, these Xeons are not more expensive than their i7 counterparts. So the question is, why get an i7 with an integrated GPU that you never plan on using when for the same money you can get a Xeon that has a larger CPU cache instead? The advantage isn't much, but there is no drawback (other than the impossibility to overclock, but I do not consider that a drawback, see my preceding reply)! For that reason, I would pick a Xeon over an i7 anytime unless I really plan on setting up a pure work computer that needs a lot of processing performance but no good graphics so I can use the integrated GPU. In fact the Xeon might be the better choice even then, because it will allow you to use the whole thermal budget of the CPU fro processing data.