Biggest difference with i7 vs xeon, xeon can handle sometimes upwares of 1tb of ram now. i7 maxes out at 64gb. You be the judge. i7 were usually 32gb, especially the LGA1100 series. The LGA2011 were @ i7 handled 64gb. LGA 2011 Xeon's are all 64GB+. Also support for ECC ram. So basically if you are not pressed for raw CPU, and you need just a lot of cpu for simulations, VM's etc, xeon is your go to CPU. Xeon LGA2011 series has some crazy CPU Socket configurations, you can get a lot depending on the motherboard vendor. I think some as many as 4+ CPU Sockets. i7 cannot run in parallel with another socket I believe. Just like with the LGA2011 1600 vs 2600 series xeons.