xfiremadex :
Xeon's are more for servers because of all the cores inside them for the ultimate multitasking and networking but an i7 will always be better for gaming. I have seen that some i7's actually beat the xeon's in performance when playing games. The i7's are also more power efficient since they can only have up to 6 cores, not 12+ like the Xeon's. I really think you should spend the extra 50$ on the cooling since that is very important in gaming, especially if you are planning to overclock.
Seriously everyone needs to stop with the blanket statements. Xeons have a wide range of specs as do consumer cpus. There are dual core xeons (yes modern gen), that's a lot of cores for ultimate multitasking right there. There are also atom server cpus, although not technically under the xeon brand, they are server cpus and very low end specs. There are a wide range of cpu uses and a wide range of cpus to go along with it.
Of course i7 could win, so could xeon. Power efficiency? The 1231v3 is exactly the same. But if you want to talk about those high end xeons, scaling cores would obviously use more power but the fact that it can have x2 the multithreaded performance with only a 60% power increase means it's actually much more efficient. But I digress, no need to further discuss irrelevant hardware.