Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 1.8GHz “Haswell” 25W CPU Review

Introduction

Intel’s Xeon E3-1230Lv3 CPU has been a hotly anticipated processor for a wide variety of target audiences – home users, office users, small business users and enterprise users. Today we’ve got an opportunity to put Intel’s enterprise Xeon E3-1230Lv3 CPU to the test in a professional home user or “prosumer” type of environment, by pairing it up with SuperMicro’s server-grade C7Z87-OCE motherboard. The Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 is an important CPU because it offers four cores, eight threads, a 1.8GHz base frequency, a 2.8GHz Turbo frequency and 8MB of cache all for a tiny TDP of just 25W. Below you can see some of those key specifications in more detail:

At $250 its tray price is roughly comparable to the Core i5 4670K which sells for $242. Though we’ve only got an Intel Core i7 4770K which sells for $339 to compare it to, a Core i5 4670K would be ideal but both processors are quite similar in performance anyway. That said, the Xeon E3-1230Lv3 certainly looks like an impressive part for the money and we want to find out exactly how well it performs! We will first walk you through our choice of motherboard and tell you why we made such a choice, then we will get onto some benchmarks followed by detailed power/temperature figures before letting you know our final thoughts on this processor.