i7 4770 vs xeon e3 1245v3 for gaming and general pc usage

[oliver max]

so, i'm down to these 2 choices.

the xeon is significantly cheaper than the i7 by the way and has same specs. I realise one should compare apples to apples but the specs are almost similar:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/75462,75122

i read from somewhere that xeons are better binned (better quality?) because I want this PC to last long.

I also do a lot of multitasking so maybe xeon has an advantage? Usually I have many tabs open (200+) while gaming and having a video played on the background. I have 32 gb of ram so perhaps xeon can utilise them better?

So what do you think?

 

[genz]

The biggest difference are that the Xeons are higher binned

Be careful not to mistake the terminology. Binning is not the process throwing away bad chips and chips with defects, it's the process of downgrading the chips with small defects that don't meet temperature/feature standards to a lower clocked model. Granted the standards are much higher for Xeons, but the vast majority of Xeon product lines don't actually scale enough to carry out any vertical binning.

Take the Haswell Xeon mentioned here... the only other product it could be binned to if it was a bad chip is the 1225 as all the other products have lesser GPUs, but the 1225 is only 200mhz slower (3.2Ghz) so more often than not a bad chip will just have to be scrapped when the equivalent chip from the consumer line will be downgraded to a 2Ghz model etc.

Binning is also finding and picking out the better chips (cherry picking could possibly be more fitting), and using those chips in the more expensive products.

That's a matter of perspective. They don't cherry pick so much as they just make every chip to the hi-end model spec and the vast majority don't make the cut. Binning is a top down process, all chips get binned where binning occurs, and before the chips are binned there is no model in that range that they were 'meant' to be. Usually the first thing that happens is they are put under cooling and then the clock rate is tested (to see how fast they can go). Some will be eliminated from the class at that point, then the next test will be conducted (heat stress, noisy power, aging etc) and so on. It basically becomes a list from best chip to worst, and (providing that there's enough chips that meet minimum requirements for each model in the range) then the sales guy comes along and says how many are needed for each model and they get LGA packaged.

This is the main reason why companies like Nvidia can post chip yields that are less than 10% and still remain solvent. Because in actuality, all the titan and 780 chips that don't make it as titans and 780s will make the vast majority of the lesser chips. This is also why you come across golden chips. Sometimes there is little demand for those high end models, so perfectly good chips get binned anyway to make up the numbers for lower end, higher demand products. The best example was the disabled cores in the Phenoms that could be re-enabled by BIOS modifications.


Beck to Haswell, at the time I forgot to regard the fact that there are lots of IGP-less chips in the Haswell server range. I doubt they would actually make the chip without a GPU so those are probably binned versions with models like the 1220Lv3 (which is only clocked to 1.1Ghz) cleaning up the crap chips that usually would be melted down.

 

[logainofhades]

1230 and 1240 lack IGP and 1245 has it.