I am planning to build a workstation whose main requirements are high single-thread performance, support for ECC memory, and a degree of energy efficiency. The second of these requirements leads me to look at Intel Xeon CPUs, but there is an incredible range and I'm unsure which to choose. If I didn't have the ECC requirement, then the Core i7-4790K would be ideal.
Using the Wikipedia list of Xeon CPUs I have located the Xeon E3-1286 v3. The relative specs are:
i7-4790K: 4.0Ghz / 88W TDP / HD Graphics 4600 / $339
E3-1286 v3: 3.7Ghz / 84W TDP / HD Graphics P4700 / $662
The Xeon seems remarkably expensive considering its lower clock. I suppose the GPU may be better considering its higher model number, but GPU performance is not a major factor for me.
Is the E3-1286 v3 the closest thing to a "i7-4790K with ECC memory support"? What accounts for the large price difference?
