Tom's Hardware published a review on the Xeon E3-1280 v2

Not long ago, we took a look at Intel’s Xeon E5 family in Intel Xeon E5-2600: Doing Damage With Two Eight-Core CPUs. In that story, we saw the company expose its Sandy Bridge-E design the way its architects originally intended: armed with eight cores, 20 MB of shared L3 cache, and QPI links cranking away at 8 GT/s. That was a far cry from the desktop Core i7-3960X we reviewed previously, neutered back to six cores and 15 MB of L3 cache—particularly since our Xeon E5-based platform was running in a dual-socket configuration in Altered Beast mode.

Now, Intel is replacing its entry-level Xeon E3s, formerly based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, with models that employ its Ivy Bridge design.

  Intel Xeon E3-1280 v2 Review: Ivy Bridge Goes Professional