Originally Posted by
Dadjitsu
"They may be similar in price, but the Xeon is heavily gimped in terms of speed. The Xeon is clocked at 2.1 GHz which is absolutely atrocious, and while it does have a turbo speed of 3GHz, you can't overclock it even if you wanted to because it's locked. On the other hand, the 5820K starts off unlocked and capable of 3.6GHz minimum (which is already 20% faster than the turbo speed of the Xeon), and has the ability to push it over 4GHz with relative ease while on air cooling. A six-core CPU that is clocked ~50% faster than an eight-core is going to be faster in probably every benchmark you can throw at it."