Intel Xeon E5-2687W 

As we'll see, that's a serious blow to the Xeon's enthusiast credentials, but not unexpected from a chip designed for stability in a workstation environment.

The enormous price of the Intel Xeon 2687W may make sense in the former, but it's far too rich for the latter, especially when you consider the lack of overclocking support.

With the arrival of the new Intel Xeon 2687W eight-core monster, we're getting a taste of what we've been missing.

The new Intel Xeon 2687W may not be targeted directly at the desktop, but it will drop straight into any Intel X79-based PC motherboard with the LGA2011 socket and fire up like a trooper.

As expected it's just not cost effective on the desktop, but still puts into question why exactly we don't have a full eight-core desktop processor in the desktop Sandy Bridge E family.

The LGA 2011 socket will still be used when Ivy Bridge E tips up.

Once you've paid for it, eight cores is what you should get.

But this time with all eight cores enabled instead of six.

Turns out, you can have all the cores enabled without winding down the frequency significantly.

That said, there's not much evidence the extra cache memory has an impact on the desktop.

If you can afford the asking price, therefore, it is an option for a desktop PC.

It's a workstation and server chip.

The most immediately revealing metrics are the single and multi-threaded Cinebench results.

The pseudo eight-core AMD FX 8150 chip isn't even in the same post code for performance.

But it's not a million miles away in several benchmarks, including professional rendering, video encoding and database crunching.