Intel Xeon E3-1280 v3 vs Intel Core i7 X 980

Xeon E3-1280 v3 vs Core i7 X 980 specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i7 X 980 is faster than the Xeon E3-1280 v3. Despite this, the Xeon E3-1280 v3 has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i7 X 980 has significantly more cores with 6 cores compared to the Xeon E3-1280 v3 that has 4 cores. It also has more threads than the Xeon E3-1280 v3. With our hardware info, we find that the Xeon E3-1280 v3 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i7 X 980.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Xeon E3-1280 v3 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.