Xeon for Gaming?

[Khajiit Dealer]

My friend needs a new CPU to pair with his gtx 960. He's leaning towards getting a Xeon, but I've been trying to tell him to get an i5. He plans on gaming and browsing. 

 

Aren't Xeons generally bad for gaming? Am I going crazy? 

[Starelementpoke]

1 minute ago, MrZany said:

My friend needs a new CPU to pair with his gtx 960. He's leaning towards getting a Xeon, but I've been trying to tell him to get an i5. He plans on gaming and browsing. 

 

Aren't Xeons generally bad for gaming? Am I going crazy? 

Depends on the xeon. Which is it?

[aisle9]

3 minutes ago, MrZany said:

Aren't Xeons generally bad for gaming? Am I going crazy? 

Which Xeon? The E3 1231v3 is basically an i7-4770 without an iGPU, and is a very capable gaming unit for considerably less than the 4770 would run him.

[Chronical93]

I don't think it is necessarily bad for gaming but I'd definitely go with an i7 or i5 for gaming, better price for performance and all that.

[Stefan1024]

You have to use a fast clocked (>2.8 GHZ) Xeon that is newer than sandy bridge. For a 960 you don't need that much CPU power.but take case, the once with a lot of core have usually a low clock speed.

[Bjorn Emmy]

Xeon's are more expencive without delivering that much more benifits for a gaming/browsing PC,

ECC support and all that stuff.

[don_svetlio]

Some are good, others not as good

E3 1231v3 is generally a fantastic CPU and is better than i5s

[aisle9]

4 minutes ago, Bjorn Emmy said:

Xeon's are more expencive without delivering that much more benifits for a gaming/browsing PC,

ECC support and all that stuff.

E3-1231V3. Look it up.

[Guest]

People are so misinformed about xeons.

 

It's a great locked i7 for much less coin. 

 

 

[Coaxialgamer]

11 minutes ago, MrZany said:

My friend needs a new CPU to pair with his gtx 960. He's leaning towards getting a Xeon, but I've been trying to tell him to get an i5. He plans on gaming and browsing. 

 

Aren't Xeons generally bad for gaming? Am I going crazy? 

Depends entirely on the xeon. They typically use less power than competing core series processors , and they will perform the same than a core i5 or i7 with the same specs . For example , the xeon e3 1231v3 is a great choice for gaming , as it costs pretty much the same as an i5 while having hyperthreading , and is clocked at similar speeds. Now the 2 ghz xeons with a lot of cores , those aren't great for gaming.

[s3ns3]

6 minutes ago, Bjorn Emmy said:

Xeon's are more expencive without delivering that much more benifits for a gaming/browsing PC,

ECC support and all that stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-i7-4770-Quad-Core-Processor-BX80646I74770/dp/B00CO8TBNS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456345782&sr=8-1&keywords=i7+4770

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1231V3B-BX80646E31231V3/dp/B00KB4A2XA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456345641&sr=8-1&keywords=xeon+1231v3

 

same cpu`s ,xeon 50$ cheaper(no igpu)

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OP sounds like your friend knows what he wants

[Compass]

The  E3-1231V3 is the same as the i7 4770 and its cheaper. I used this in my recent build till I upgraded to haswell-e.

 

Worked great.

[SteveGrabowski0]

I got a Xeon E3-1231v3 for my system since it was the cheapest way to get an i7. It's an i7-4771 minus 100 MHz on the quadcore turbo and without integrated graphics. It does a great job running even the really cpu heavy games like GTA V, Fallout 4, and Witcher 3. It's a little more expensive than an i5-4690k, but I took the chance on games becoming better parallelized since I play mostly console ports and good parallelization is the only hope AAA games have for running on the weak processors inside the PS4 and XB1. And as i3 vs Pentium G3258 showed, often hyperthreading can do more than higher clockspeed can for making up for a core count deficiency.

[harrynowl]

well there's more that one xeon but the ones that are i7 equivalents (usually for a little less) are good pickups.