Intel i5 4690k vs. Intel Xeon E3-1231

[seakay]

Looking for a good all around PCU for occasional gaming, media, downloading, video in 1080p, and running multiple programs.

Which is the better PCU?
Intel i5 4690k vs. Intel Xeon E3-1231

 

[MeteorsRaining]

I'd go for Xeon as it's basically an i7 without integrated graphics and OC-ability. i5 does have it's plus in being K-SKU thus being able to OC, but unless you're in need for the best GPU in the market for years to come (since OCing reduces bottlenecks caused by core clock speeds), you'd be satisfied by Xeon's stock clock speeds over i5.

 

[bjsm]

Looking for a good all around PCU for occasional gaming, media, downloading, video in 1080p, and running multiple programs.

Which is the better PCU?
Intel i5 4690k vs. Intel Xeon E3-1231

You can also have a look at this. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E3-1231V3-vs-Intel-Core-i5-4690K

 

[bjsm]

I'd go for Xeon as it's basically an i7 without integrated graphics and OC-ability. i5 does have it's plus in being K-SKU thus being able to OC, but unless you're in need for the best GPU in the market for years to come (since OCing reduces bottlenecks caused by core clock speeds), you'd be satisfied by Xeon's stock clock speeds over i5.

Keep in mind you absolutely need a gpu to have display. Xeon cpus do not have integrated graphics. Just a thing to make sure u know.

 

[MeteorsRaining]

I'd go for Xeon as it's basically an i7 without integrated graphics and OC-ability. i5 does have it's plus in being K-SKU thus being able to OC, but unless you're in need for the best GPU in the market for years to come (since OCing reduces bottlenecks caused by core clock speeds), you'd be satisfied by Xeon's stock clock speeds over i5.

Keep in mind you absolutely need a gpu to have display. Xeon cpus do not have integrated graphics. Just a thing to make sure u know.

Since gaming is one of the purposes, there's little doubt about getting a discrete GPU, thanks anyways for pointing out.

PS. Just noticed I mentioned it in my first post itself, nevermind.

 

[synphul]

There's a $40-50 price difference between the e3 1231 and the i5 4590. They're 100mhz apart in both stock base/turbo speeds. The $45 price difference is for 2mb cache and hyperthreading which gives around 10-12% more performance in some situations if those particular tasks are more heavily threaded. Still cheaper than an i7 but still a hefty price premium for hyperthreading. If microcenter is part of the equation for buying options, due to their much lower prices it becomes an $80 difference between those two but unfortunately microcenter doesn't ship so it's a matter of whether or not you live close enough to one.

 

[seakay]

Nope, just moved away from MicroCenter so not part of the equation.

Yes I'm planning on installing a dedicated GPU. I've been looking at the; EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card, is a good option???

This is what I originally put together but am getting talked out of the FX all over the forum. Any input is appreciated.

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/6vpKRB
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/6vpKRB/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor ($137.95 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($100.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($66.98 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($134.00 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($80.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card ($124.99 @ NCIX US)
Case: Corsair 500R Black ATX Mid Tower Case ($89.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($51.49 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($56.99 @ Micro Center)
Total: $844.36
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-03-25 16:58 EDT-0400

 

[synphul]

Looking at the original post, unclear on video at 1080p - playing, encoding, converting? Downloading has more to do with the internet connection and storage drive speed (ssd, hdd etc). It's not really a cpu intensive task. Media, again not sure if that's creating media, video or audio conversion or watching movies and listening to music. Gaming definitely benefits from faster core speed/ipc which is intel's strength. Any of the cpu's mentioned, the xeon, 4690k, fx 8320, even an i3 or fx 4xxx/6xxx would be enough for that.

You could certainly go with fx over intel, they cost less and perform under intel's chips in most things. Intel isn't known for having the best igpu's - that would be amd's apu's but even a 4690k with the 4600 igpu is plenty to play bluray videos. For any real gaming that requires more than fb flash games or lighter weight steam games, a discrete card is pretty much a must. The 750 ti is a decent middle of the road card and is impressively low on power consumption. I think most cards don't even need an external pcie power adapter and can get their power solely from the pcie slot.

There are multiple benchmarks on anandtech's site, aside from this link you can use the left hand drop down menus to select various benchmarks by category and then specific tests on the dropdown beneath that. Some are outdated, others are new. Intel's i5's and xeons and i7's pretty much dominate the top of the charts for most categories whether it's sysmark and the multiple productivity options there, or web benchmarks, divx encoding, win media encoder 9, blender 3d rendering etc. There are other places with benchmarks both synthetic and real world, that just happens to be a pretty decent list in one spot.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1033

 

[seakay]

Thank you all for the input.

@synphul, sorry for the following newbie answer but I am a newbie so pls bear with me.
Video at 1080p would be, playing, and also unsure if this would be encoding or converting, but I often have to convert my torrent formats from one to another before burning a disk so that it is compatible with my PS3 and Bluray player. I believe this involves encoding and converting??? But I would like to to be able to do this and burn a Bluray at fast speeds.

Also, my current machine bogs-down when Im doing research for school on the internet. I'll have multiple tabs open in my browser (sometimes as many as 10) and I'll try to flip back and forth between the tabs, but it takes an age to do so. When I check my CPU gage, it's usually maxed out at a 100%. It will do the same when I'm doing a scan of my drives and try to open another program. This is what I meant by multiple programs.

 

[synphul]

There's a few things that are causing your issues. To answer the video bit, usually it's referred to as transcoding - turning say .avi into .mpeg or anything else. Bluray burning will likely be more limited by the burn speed of your bluray burner, having sufficient ram (8gb or more) and the speed of your hard drive or ssd. Usually optical media is slower than either hdd or ssd so the data flow being read from the storage device and burned physically to a disc is limited by the burner.

I don't know what your current specs are but bogging down while using a browser on the internet will be a couple of things. Webpage loading speeds are affected by the speed/quality of your actual internet connection and service. Lag switching tabs is probably from not having enough ram, especially if using multiple programs at the same time. When you run out of ram, the pc has to make use of the much slower swap file and access the hard drive. Same thing when trying to work while running a scan, your cpu may be maxed which isn't helping but it's asking a lot of the storage disk to scan it and work from it at the same time. It can only do one thing at a time so trying to work while scanning is going to be a severe bottleneck regardless.

You can try setting the scan to something like background scanning where it will pause the scan and do whatever immediate task you're asking it to do, then when there's a lull in your active task it will go back to scanning. The more heavy multitasking you try to do, the more ram helps. When you run out and the swap file kicks in, things slow down immensely. On a workstation used for graphic design, with photoshop, illustrator, bridge and 3-4 chrome windows with anywhere from 5-30 tabs each an i5 doesn't slow down hardly at all. But it uses 12-14gb of 16gb installed ram and an ssd as an os/programs drive with an additional hard drive for storing/saving files to. Having multiple drives in a situation like that can greatly improve performance where reading from one and writing to another on separate paths. Reading and writing data from the same drive puts a load on it that can slow things down.

 

[seakay]

Ok, so to summarize. The Intel Xeon E3 1231, a decent GPU for occasional gaming (primarily Civilization Beyond Earth), 8mb RAM, 7200RPM HD, Samsung Evo 840 SSD, a good 16x Bluray writer, and setting scan to background scanning should do the trick?

 

[synphul]

That should work and most 1150 motherboards should have 4 ram slots so if you go with 2x4gb and still find you're running out of ram you can always add another 8gb. If/when things begin to lag, looking at the system resources is a good indicator of what's causing it. Take a peek at your ram usage from time to time to determine if you have enough. Also, since it's a desktop system why not set your antivirus scans and things for a time when you're not using the pc like sometime during the night. Scanning shouldn't have to be a constant thing and to run scans while using the machine is the worst possible time since it slows you and the scan down. Some scanning may take even longer if you access a portion of the drive or write data to it mid-scan if the scanner has to go back and rescan because of changes made.