Intel Xeon E3-1280 v2 Review: Ivy Bridge Goes Professional

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Intel recently introduced its Xeon E3-1200 v2 CPUs, based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. Though they're very similar to the third-generation desktop Core chips, ECC memory support, four extra PCIe 3.0 lanes, and attractive pricing grab our attention.

Benchmark Results: Transcoding

Known for its propensity to scale based on frequency, IPC throughput, and parallelism, MainConcept shows the biggest gap between Xeon E3 SKUs seen thus far. Absolutely, waiting six more seconds for a Xeon E3-1290 to finish its task isn’t major, but the 10% improvement could be significant in more demanding workloads.

Similar to the SolidWorks benchmark, HandBrake enjoys more of an advantage from Intel’s Ivy Bridge design that we see from the other benchmarks. Intel’s Xeon E3-1280 v2 achieves a strong win as a result.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.