Hey so even though that was a heated discussion, it was useful for me to understand the differences between the various options. Judging from what's been discussed it seems like the Xeon would make more sense at this point.
I think the Xeon is a reasonable choice in general, but I just wanted to compare it to the i5 4670k more in depth. Now I touched on this briefly before, but mfenn said it probably wouldn't be worth it. However, looking at prices, I could buy an i5 4670k + z87 motherboard + a cooling solution for roughly same price as it would cost me to simply get the Xeon + an H87 Motherboard. I.e.:
i5 4670k + ASRock Z87 Pro3 for $312
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...&SID=u00000687
and
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO for $35
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103099
Total = $347
vs.
Xeon E3-1230 V3 for $255
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687
and
ASRock H87 Pro4 for $83
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687
Total = $338
And from my understanding, looking at benchmarks comparing the i7 4770k to the i5 4670k (where the Xeon is ~5% slower than the i7 4770k)
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/836?vs=837
The largest gap appears to be in the 7zip performance, so I assume this abuses the multiple threads the most, and the difference between the i7 and the i5 is about 27% (so roughly the xeon will be 22% better in heavily threaded applications than the i5 at stock clocks). The other benches suggest that the i5 is within 5% of the i7 in applications that don't abuse the hyperthreading aspect, so we can expect the Xeon to perform on par with the i5 in non-heavily threaded scenarios
So in the worst case scenario, I'd have to overclock my i5 4670k to increase it's performance by 22% in to match a stock Xeon E3-1230 V3 in the worst case scenarios. At a 3.5ghz stock clock, that means i need to achieve an increase of 0.77ghz, or overclock the i5 to 4.17ghz. But this also means that in any scenario that is not the worst case scenario, I'd have a somewhat significant benefit in speed (up to around 20%).
From what I've read, 4.17ghz would be fairly doable on an i5 4670k, since I guess the typical overclock is around 4.5ghz?
So my question is therefore, with these assumptions, in theory I could spend $9 more, forgo the Xeon and buy an i5 4670k, and overclock it to 4.2ghz (with hopefully no voltage increases), and achieve better performance in any scenario but the worst case for a very tiny increase in price, and still achieve par performance in the worst case scenario. I am not super concerned about resale price, I doubt that I will be reselling this in a time frame where it would make a difference if I had overclocked it or not.
Is this worth it in this scenario? Is it possible to reliably overclock an i5 4670k to 4.1 or 4.2ghz with minimal or no voltage increases? If not, what sort of voltage increase would I be looking at, and what sort of impact would that have on chip lifetime (although I know that's pretty much an unanswerable question).
Also as a separate note, what do you guys think about the 7870 Myst Edition cards? There is a PowerColor card on Newegg right now for $140 which seems ridiculously cheap to me. From what I can tell, you guys don't think that anything short of a 7970 will last effectively for 5 years. If I was willing to upgrade the GPU 2.5 years down the line, would the 7870 make more sense at this point then?
Again, thanks for the help, taking a crash course in current hardware parts is much easier with some guidance :thumbsup: