Xeon are professionnal grade CPU, lots of cores/threads at lower frequency. You don’t necessarily want “fast”. But older generations will be usually slower and use a tad more power. Still what you can do with professionnal grade hardware is not comparable to what you do with general public hardware.
Which one will complete a plot faster?
A Xeon equipped T5810? Or an i5 equipped box?
I would bet on a Xeon but depends what model.
I have a T5810 for sale, I replaced it with a T7910 which was great for the old way of making plots, but overkill for GPU plotting.
My T7910 creates K32 C7 plots in 5 minutes using a 3080, that’s in Windows and on Bladebit, Gigahorse was 144 seconds for a C8 K32, again in Windows.
No reason that the T5810 wont be the same or quicker, as it doesn’t have to deal with NUMA.
Both machines have E5-2699v3 cpu’s
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Your 3080 card is responsible for the fast plotting times.
I am guessing that if you put that card in just about any decent motherboard, you would get similar plotting times.
Is my understanding correct?
I am trying to understand the attraction to the T5810 is.
Is there a particularly good Xeon model CPU that has impressive performance at a bargain price?
Why go for the T5810 with some Xeon CPU over an i5 or an i7 with the same 3080 card?
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Because it can support 256GB of RAM, no i5 or i7 can do that, maximum they can support is 128GB RAM.
Gigahorse will work with 128GB or less, but currently BladeBit will not.
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Ah!
Good to know.
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Xeon are professionnal grade and you can do more with them… just like SAS ! 
Well of course you can, but memory capacity, and CPU core count was one of the big attractions originally with regard to Chia.
Of course you have more PCIe lanes, they typically support bifurcation as well, built in SAS controllers etc.
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