Xeon E3-1230v3 Questions

DeepOne

Honorable
Sep 8, 2013
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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!
 
Solution
Xeon is just branding, there really is nothing special about it vs an i7 other than it can use ecc ram. All haswell 1150 cpus use tim, this is not specific to xeons. The stock fan is sufficient for stock speeds.