What do you think of this Cpu? The Xeon e3 1230 v3?

and so I stumbled to few articles regarding the "xeon e3 1230 v3" and instead of buying wanting an i7 4770k the budget xeon piqued my interest, it has a massively significant lower power consumption and thermal output

Hyperthreading for upcoming games right?

Xeon E-3's are server processors and are great number crunchers, ...[snip] But in terms of gaming the i7 is the way to go. you might see a push in performance in video editing with the Xeon but the i7 in combination with a GPU is the best for gaming in terms of vs a Xeon E-3.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

hyperthreading will mostly be for your work related applications such as editing, encoding, and rendering, it virtually does nothing in gaming atm and some people run games better WITHOUT it.

Let me put it this way... if you have a Z or P series motherboard, you want a "k" model i5 or i7

but

If you have a H, B, or Q series motherboard, then you want a Xeon e3-1230v2/v3

I am not sure what you mean with "killer network in MSI boards", but I have a feeling that it is one of these useless features mainboard manufacturers add in a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from the competition. It is true that the Z87 chipset pretty much offers the full range of features (except some enterprise-related features), but it is also true that Z87 mainboards usually consume more power and that Z87 hardly offers any features over the cheaper H87 or even B85 that anyone would ever make use of. With the exception of overclocking, which I would never consider doing, see the link I am giving below.

Most people that buy Z87 do so because:

• 
  ■ they want to overclock and are unaware of the numerous drawbacks overclocking Intel CPUs has (see link below). They are also uncomfortable with the idea of non-Z-overclocking although it works nicely (only disadvantage being that it may keep them from installing future BIOS updates)
  ■ they want a highly expensive mainboard because they consider it a status symbol and simply do not feel comfortable with anything cheaper in their case, even though the performance would be the same
  ■ they desire all the added functionality without being aware that they will never ever use it (who ever connects more than two USB 3.0 (!) devices simultaneously to his computer? Who connects more than four SATA 3.0 hard disks simultaneously? Who is actually using the RST feature to have the driver automatically use his SSD as a cache drive?

Of course there are also a few people here that are aware of all the overclocking drawbacks and still want to do it without BIOS update restrictions. I believe that this is a small minority though.


No, it has not. Xeon's 80W against 4770's 84W can hardly be considered "massively significant".

The question is why you compare a "budget" Xeon E3 1230 v3 against a 4770. You should compare the 4770K to a Xeon E3-1270. Identical clock speed, approximately identical price.

If you want to save money, you can find lower-clocked variants on both the i7 and the Xeon side. This is not something that should sway the decision between i7 and Xeon.


Both chips have HT, so this makes no difference here.


This is nonsense, and the link you provided is free of substantial information. They made a wanton subjective ranking of what they find better without giving substantial reasons, and already you are drawing the wrong conclusions. Shows that THG is no longer than what it was when chain-smoker Tom wrote the articles himself rather than have his lackeys do it for him.

The Xeon is in no way inferior to an equally-clocked i7 in gaming. That is just nonsense, seeing that Xeon and i7 have identical cores.


Off-topic since all the CPUs being discussed here include HT, so this is no the decision to be made. Besides, if you had cared to read the initial question, you would know that a high focus is on editing, where HT can be beneficial. Any games that perform worse through HT only minimally do so and are so old that they will still run flawlessly on any of the discussed CPUs.


Both statements are arguable. The first statement is arguable because of this, and the second statement is arguable because you can go for non-Z-overclocking.

Okay so does everybody agree that the Xeon is the better choice if he is not overclocking? Yes? Okay! So stop arguing.