Thinking of completely giving up on gaming hardware

[Cromulent]

I've got to the stage now where I so rarely play games it seems to be a massive waste of money to go for the latest gaming hardware. My main PC occupations at the moment are video editing and running virtual machines for programming.

Now when it comes to virtual machines the number of CPU cores you have the amount of RAM you have is critical. The same is kind of true for video editing. Even my reasonably modern high-end system struggles with rendering 4k footage at 60fps, which is what I want to make the permanent move to.

Does anyone else feel that they have just outgrown the whole gaming thing? I'd much rather spend my time doing something productive on my PC than play games. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with playing games I just feel like it isn't for me anymore.

I think my next PC will be much more professionally orientated. Either Threadripper or maybe even EPYC depending on budget.

 

[Journey]

EPYC will be slower for editing than a TR due to clock speed deficiency.

Now that is it if the way... You can game on any hardware, the main difference is normally the GPU in use, but when these days with CUDA acceleration in many applications your still end up with something capable of running most titles.

If by gaming hardware you mean RGB and high refresh monitors, then I agree they are easily grown out of.

 

[Cromulent]

EPYC will be slower for editing than a TR due to clock speed deficiency.

Now that is it if the way... You can game on any hardware, the main difference is normally the GPU in use, but when these days with CUDA acceleration in many applications your still end up with something capable of running most titles.

If by gaming hardware you mean RGB and high refresh monitors, then I agree they are easily grown out of.

Thank you for your reply. I see what you mean about EPYC. The problem is that most hypervisors like enterprise-class CPUs with features to match. In the past, I would have gone with an Intel Xeon but now that AMD EPYC is so competitive I could quite happily use that for all of my virtual machine hosting needs. I take your point about GPU accelerated software still requiring a gaming capable GPU but I was thinking of getting an Nvidia Quadro rather than the gaming cards. I guess I could live with slower rendering speeds of 4k footage at 60fps if I was sure that everything else I wanted to use my computer for was going to be powerful enough. Virtual machines really do take a lot out of a system.

 

[Journey]

I'm pretty sure you'll find a 32c/64t Threadripper 3xxx with 128GB quad channel RAM hitting 4.0GHz more than enough for a good few VM's.

Quadro/GeForce there is no speed difference when comparing the same specification hardware in terms of cores/speed/RAM etc. It's the colour depth, and other professional features for rendering etc that make the Quadro cards more sought after. Something like Premier Pro isn't going to care which you use.

 

[Cromulent]

I'm pretty sure you'll find a 32c/64t Threadripper 3xxx with 128GB quad channel RAM hitting 4.0GHz more than enough for a good few VM's.

Quadro/GeForce there is no speed difference when comparing the same specification hardware in terms of cores/speed/RAM etc. It's the colour depth, and other professional features for rendering etc that make the Quadro cards more sought after. Something like Premier Pro isn't going to care which you use.

The thing about the Quadro card though is that you can have it running in multiple virtual machines at the same time. To do the same with gaming hardware and you'd need multiple GPUs.

I do think you are right about the Threadripper though. It'll save me a bit of money going for that.

 

[WantoN]

I built my rig second hand, saving a lot of cash. I’ve no interest in upgrading for years.

I play games much less.

 

[Journey]

The thing about the Quadro card though is that you can have it running in multiple virtual machines at the same time. To do the same with gaming hardware and you'd need multiple GPUs.

I do think you are right about the Threadripper though. It'll save me a bit of money going for that.

Do you need GPU acceleration in more than one VM at a time?
What are you going to be using all these VM's for that you aren't doing currently?

SR-IOV/vDWS are certainly useful, but having it and using it are two different things. You then need to look at the cost of getting a Quadro card with the same horsepower as normal GeForce card, for example the Quadro RTX 4000 is basically an RTX 2070 but costs about £1k, it would actually be cheaper to have a multi-GPU configuration if you need more speed than the equivalent of a single RTX 2070 can offer in a single VM instance. I'm not saying that the Quadro 4000 supports what you want to achieve btw.

 

[Quartz]

EPYC will be slower for editing than a TR due to clock speed deficiency.

That's not necessarily correct. If the application can use the multiple cores, the Epyc CPU may well be faster due to more cores. Hexus have an interesting article on the new Rome Epyc CPUs here.