Support Case: Xeon vs. i7

Dear Support Team,

I am struggeling with an educated decision for a new system and Christian Gruner indicated that Xeons are "not really great performers" for C1 and he suggested i7s instead.

Assuming the grafics card is not supported, or assuming that hardware acceleration (OpenCL) is set to "Never" in the preferences, which of the Intel processor types perform better with regards to preview rendering on the monitor (moving sliders, local adjustments) and out processing?

To give you an example these two processors are very similarly specified.

Intel Xeon E5-1650v3 3.50GHz 15MB 2133 6Core
vs.
Intel Core i7-5930K 3.50GHz 15MB 2133 6Core

http://ark.intel.com/de/products/82765/ ... e-3_50-GHz
vs.
http://ark.intel.com/de/products/82931/ ... o-3_70-GHz


Note, the Xeon (or Xeons in general) does not list SSE4.2 explicitly but AVX/AVX2 are supposed to be extensions of SSE instruction sets, but I don't know for sure and don't have a imgcore.log for a Xeon.

Question 1: Can you please advise whether or not this Xeon (or other Xeons) are performing worse then this i7 (or i7s similar to a Xeon "counterpart")?
Question 2: What is this advise based on? (facts / tests / C1 CPU benchmarks or theory)
QUestion 3: Does the preference setting "hardware acceleration" also have an impact on CPU processing, if yes which impact / effect, i.e. is OpenCL not used on the CPU?

Note, I will decide for a grafics card seperately, this is out of scope of my questions.
Operating system: MS Windows
I still have CO8 but I ask for CO9, if this makes a difference.

Thanks and best regards
BeO