I've been thinking about building a fairly powerful desktop system in the next few months to hopefully last 4-5 years at the very least. I'm a .NET programmer by profession so running VS2010 is a must. On occasion I may need one or more VMs for testing. I'm also looking to do some video editing and rendering/animation as well. Most Intel/AMD desktop CPUs can easily do this today.
However, I've been looking at the latest Xeon E3-series CPUs, specifically the E3-1230. 4 cores, w/HT = 8 threads with 8MB L3 cache at 80W is impressive. The price seems very competitive and the newer C202/204/206 boards look good as well.
While I plan to do more productive activities on my desktop, I still play games from time to time. Granted, I may not play the latest and greatest (Civ V, Starcraft 2, HL2, etc.), but I still play when I can.
I know Xeons can run games and such but is there a significant difference between i5,i7,Phenom II,Bulldozer, etc. CPUs vs. Xeons in playing games? If I get a high-end ATI/nVidia GPU, can I expect that card to perform at or near it's potential running on a Xeon system in comparison to an non-Xeon system?
The cost between the desktop parts vs. xeon parts is much more narrow than I anticipated and I'm just trying to understand the system level differences and/or pitfalls of a xeon desktop.
