Hello!
Situation: I'm building a new (mostly gaming) PC for a moderate price.
Budget: around 700-800 Euros (have case, HDD, monitor already).
No overclocking planned.
CPU: Haswell (more possibilities for future upgrades).
Usage: 80% gaming / 20% rendering+calcs.
After studying A LOT of (really useful!) threads on TH forums I was almost sure it will be a i5-4670 (+ GTX760 fits in above sum). Wasn't considering Xeon at all until someone mentioned it as a nice alternative: "An i7 for the price of an i5 minus iGPU plus HT" - sounds great.
In fact, E3-1230v3 costs insignificantly more than i5-4670, same inexpensive MB (no OC anyway). What I get for that is HyperThreading. I know, Xeons are often said to be "meant for workstations" and HT to "have no benefit in most games". For me, however, there is at least one important counter-example to that: X-Rebirth (game), which is said to benefit from virtually any additional number of cores/threads. So currently I'm tempted to get a 1230v3 (on a Gigabyte GA-H87-HD3).
Now my actual questions:
- Am I missing any drawback in having a not-so-common Xeon in a desktop PC? Any significant drawback in single-thread games vs i5?
- Are there any known compatibility issues, especially with software (something not working on Xeons at all), or is it absolutely transparent nowadays?
- I remember reading something about "low quality thermal paste" used in (inside) v2 and v3 Xeon, but can't find the source anymore. Can hardly imagine it being true (in a workstation CPU!), nevertheless, any info on that?
- Would it be advisable to replace the stock cooler immediately? Considering I won't (can't) OC and there will be a GTX760 somewhere nearby? Is stock fan noisy at full load?
Thanks in advance!
Situation: I'm building a new (mostly gaming) PC for a moderate price.
Budget: around 700-800 Euros (have case, HDD, monitor already).
No overclocking planned.
CPU: Haswell (more possibilities for future upgrades).
Usage: 80% gaming / 20% rendering+calcs.
After studying A LOT of (really useful!) threads on TH forums I was almost sure it will be a i5-4670 (+ GTX760 fits in above sum). Wasn't considering Xeon at all until someone mentioned it as a nice alternative: "An i7 for the price of an i5 minus iGPU plus HT" - sounds great.
In fact, E3-1230v3 costs insignificantly more than i5-4670, same inexpensive MB (no OC anyway). What I get for that is HyperThreading. I know, Xeons are often said to be "meant for workstations" and HT to "have no benefit in most games". For me, however, there is at least one important counter-example to that: X-Rebirth (game), which is said to benefit from virtually any additional number of cores/threads. So currently I'm tempted to get a 1230v3 (on a Gigabyte GA-H87-HD3).
Now my actual questions:
- Am I missing any drawback in having a not-so-common Xeon in a desktop PC? Any significant drawback in single-thread games vs i5?
- Are there any known compatibility issues, especially with software (something not working on Xeons at all), or is it absolutely transparent nowadays?
- I remember reading something about "low quality thermal paste" used in (inside) v2 and v3 Xeon, but can't find the source anymore. Can hardly imagine it being true (in a workstation CPU!), nevertheless, any info on that?
- Would it be advisable to replace the stock cooler immediately? Considering I won't (can't) OC and there will be a GTX760 somewhere nearby? Is stock fan noisy at full load?
Thanks in advance!