This is too funny - I was about to reply to you, and then decided to check my files. Lo and behold, I found that when I bought the components in March 2012, I bought an Intel E5-2609 (which is indeed a Xeon!) for $299. Had I not looked, I never would have guessed.
Thinking about it now (and I might be wrong), the machine has 32GB of RAM, so I might have bought the Xeon to go above 16GB. Can anyone confirm if that would have made sense at the time (or if my memory is just fuzzy?) ?
Second hand PC dealers in my country (Turkey) used to put together affordable gaming rigs using old Xeon processors a couple of years back. That's why my first guess was that if it was a Xeon.
I think Xeon processors also have special motherboards, so you can put TWO processors on some of them. That was a huge selling point for computer nerds like me.
Wikipedia says "Because of a hardware limitation not fixed until Ivy Bridge-E in 2013, most older Intel CPUs only support up to 4 gibibit chips for 8 GiB DIMMs". The E5-2609 is at the generation of sandy bridge. So you probably bought the Xeon to support 32GB :).
