I7 or xeon?

[exia46]

so im trying to do a budget work station build and i found that most name brand workstations run intel xeon processors, but also reading lots of systems run on the i7 series. but i found an intel xeon thats an i5 price but runs hella better than an i7. so what in the world would be better to run my 3d rendering set up? hyper threading or intel integrated graphics? also just to help me out anyone recomend a motherboard if xeon is the way to go?

 

[amuffin]

What software are you going to be using?

 

[exia46]

ill be using a number of programs from auto desk creation suite, maya, mudbox, motion builder, and various adobe programs like after affects, photoshop, and premier pro. zbrush, poser pro, 3ds max, unreal, unity, blender. i got more but you got the idea

 

[amuffin]

I'd go with whatever is cheaper and up it on the GPU! All of those programs support some form of GPU Acceleration.

 

[exia46]

granted yes ill be going with an nvidia quadro series card but i still need a good processor to handel all the information because ill have multiple programs open at once

 

[k1114]

Xeon and i7 will get the same performance granted the specs are the same. I'm going to take a guess and say you are looking at the e3 1230v2 as it is near an i5 price but i7 specs. The advantage of an i7 is that you can overclock it for more performance. Igpu won't do anything unless you need more monitors.

These benchmarks are SB, but the same applies for IB: exactly the same performance on i7 vs xeon. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeon-e3-c206-workstation,2933.html

 

[noise]

Xeon supports ECC memory if you care about it - also typically has more L3 cache. That being said I think I'd go i7 (assuming no ECC RAM), clock rates on the i7 are usually higher for the same money.