I recently purchased a used Xeon X3470 to replace my Core i5-760. I wanted to upgrade to the i7 and since the X3470 is pretty well identical to the i7-870 but cheaper I thought it was a better buy.
All the forums I read did not mention any major difference except for the memory ECC support on the Xeon and my motherboard listed it as a supported CPU. So I decided to buy it. The X3480/i7-880 is only ~3% faster compared to the X3470/i7-870 so not worth the premium in price for my budget.
However when doing a side by side product comparison I spotted a difference that concerns me.
The Xeon CPUs have a maximum # of PCI Express Lanes of 1 while the i7 equivalents have a maximum # of PCI Express Lanes of 16.
Does this mean that the graphics performance with a PCIe graphics card and Xeon CPUs will be inferior to the equivalent i7?
What exactly does this difference of maximum # of PCI Express Lanes imply?
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
All the forums I read did not mention any major difference except for the memory ECC support on the Xeon and my motherboard listed it as a supported CPU. So I decided to buy it. The X3480/i7-880 is only ~3% faster compared to the X3470/i7-870 so not worth the premium in price for my budget.
However when doing a side by side product comparison I spotted a difference that concerns me.
The Xeon CPUs have a maximum # of PCI Express Lanes of 1 while the i7 equivalents have a maximum # of PCI Express Lanes of 16.
Does this mean that the graphics performance with a PCIe graphics card and Xeon CPUs will be inferior to the equivalent i7?
What exactly does this difference of maximum # of PCI Express Lanes imply?
Thanks for taking the time to respond.