just curious which would be better in the end: an FX 8350 or a Xeon E3 1620 v3? Will be editing, gaming, and modeling in 3d with blender.
I believe that's a Xeon E5. It won't be good in games, but strong in editing and modeling. Consider an Xeon E3-1241v3 if you want to game as well.
Realistically performance will be about the same, with a few things running slightly faster on the Xeon. The 8350 and most ASUS AM3+ boards also support ECC memory, but generally you can get a motherboard for cheaper than you can get one for the Xeon. If you want rock solid server grade stability and a supermicro board, get the Xeon. If you want to get something thats about the same performance wise for quite a few bones cheaper, get the 8350. Its half the price of the Xeon, and a good solid AM3+ 990FX board will be about 50 bucks or so cheaper than a Supermicro LGA1150 board.
Actually get the 8370 or 8370E-- the new updated SKUs
Overall the FX8350.
I have a Xeon 1230v3 and an AMD 8350 OCed to 4.8.
In game they are roughly similar. Although the Xeon wins in games that favornsingle core performance like DayZ.
Productivity wise at least for video editing and rendering they are about the same. They trade blows back and forth.
The 1230 and 1241 are roughly similar. The 1230 has a slightly lower (200 MHz) max boost but that's it. It is also around $20-$40 cheaper.