This could be useful.

2. Opterons are processors designed for servers. Probably not what you want for a desktop PC. Personally, I'd go with the best CPU you can afford, and Intel has generally be preferable to AMD for awhile now. If you can afford it, go for something like a Intel i7-7700. You should be reasonably 'future-proofed' for awhile with a processor like that.

3. A3D and EAX are dead. A3D was absorbed by Creative Labs after Aureal went bankrupt from a Creative Labs lawsuit. And EAX was basically broken by Microsoft after they got rid of DirectSound in Windows Vista and beyond. Creative Labs ended up releasing ALchemy (basically a DirectSound wrapper) so that people could still play games with EAX support. But all in all, it feels like 3D sound took a real dive in the last decade. Unless you're doing more extensive audio stuff, a built-in motherboard sound card will be fine.

4. 4K displays are very pretty. That said, I'd take a triple-monitor 1080p setup over 4K any day of the week.

A huge lot depends on your budget.

There is a general consensus that high end i5s or a Ryzen 5 will breeze you through most modern games with no problems with plenty of headroom and they are cheaper.

Opteron are server CPUs - why do you consider them as an option for a gaming PC?

Dedicated audio card only makes sense if you care about additional features for in-game communications online or some other competitive gaming silliness. Tech is long past the point where I personally can distinguish FLAC played on one card from a FLAC played on the other, but if you can hear difference between high SNRs and you have money to burn for your daily Tchaikovsky cravings then additional sound is indeed an option.

A3D and such are dead, everything related to positioning and reverb-style effects offloaded to CPU these days.

You decision about video card should be directly related to what frame rate and resolution are acceptable to you personally. There are more than plenty videos on YouTube on the matter. E.g. if you interested in "60 FPS Dawn of War III at 4k" - enter that in youtube search and a bunch of vids with specs in the description will pop up for sure. However if you can handle 30 FPS 1080p like I do - you have way way more options and can save insane amounts of money 😀. Adaptive framerate technologies like Gsync and Freesync are also a thing as well as high refresh rate monitors, but it's entirely up to you to decide whether you need a graphics card+monitor combo to have these features depending on how exciting the marketing talk on the matter is to you. I personally couldn't care less about this tech as well as refresh rates past 75.

Cheers

Built in audio got pretty decent for anything but professional work so people tend to stick with it these days. I bet Creative makes more money selling speakers then sound cards anymore.

1. If you are going after fastest graphics setup, especially since you're eyeing the 1080Ti, you have to choose the latest PCI-E version. Even the 980Ti will benefit from the latest, I think.

2. Ryzen CPUs came out of nowhere and is posing serious competition to Intel's CPU dominance. If you prefer Intel, you can go for any mainstream i7 of the current Gen.

3. I think on-board sound hardware has come a long way, and they are very advanced now. And due to specs becoming norm, you get most of the essential stuff across most boards. There's not much reason to get an expensive dedicated sound card anymore. These expensive cards are still being made, because Creative needs to stay in business.

4. 4K will be a personal preference, and if the gamer would like to shell out more money for the screen as well as for the graphics card. For me, I prefer to stay at 1080p. (Cheaper, still looks good, and doesn't stress the graphics card, comparatively. I'm using 980Ti.)

1. 2 is fine but there's no sense in buying a new motherboard that only supports 2.
2. Depends on how you want to game. "Enough" implies minimum requirements to me but you ask about 4K below. If you want 4K then you need an i5/i7 or equivalent for the latest games.
3. Depends on the integrated sound card and how it's implemented. As with anything if they did a shit job then you'll get shit audio but you may not care or notice. Read reviews.
4. Depends on what you want. Some people can game at 30hz, some at 60hz, some at 144hz. Some like freesync or gsync. Some like IPS or can use TN without issue.
I bought a new monitor last year but I went for 27" 1440p w/ gsync @ 144hz since the 4k monitors were/are crap, the 4k would need a huge monitor, I didn't want to deal with scaling issues and I don't do SLI. Also IPS monitors still have horrible blacks but there's a tech that doesn't and soon we'll have HDR as well. No sense in spending a huge amount on a 4k monitor.

My budget isn't particularly limited, but still I am a greedy one and want to think of a 'bang per buck'. That's why I thought of an used 16-core Opteron 6380 which is maybe $150-200, and a new Socket G34 motherboard which is another $220-$250. And a $100 for Socket G34 cooler. This way I'll have plenty of cheap ECC DDR3, but only PCI-E 2.0 - which probably will somewhat strap faster GPUs. Low CPU frequency is another thing that bothers me.

We see that in theory the Opteron 6380 is not so much behind 7700K in Passmark: https://technical.city/en/cpu/Core-i7-7700K-vs-Opteron-6380. But for gaming purposes situation may be different, considering 2.5 Ghz freq.

There are 2.7 Ghz 6284 SE and 2.8 Ghz 6386 SE Opterons, both sixteen core, but they cost somewhat about $250 and $330 used... Which it not so far from $400 i7-7700K new.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/Ge … xpress_Scaling/

You'll be fine with 2.0 😀

For gaming you need ~4 fast cores, so a Bulldozer Opteron is going to get, well, bulldozed by pretty much any i7, especially Haswell or newer.

bristlehog wrote:

My budget isn't particularly limited, but still I am a greedy one and want to think of a 'bang per buck'. That's why I thought of an used 16-core Opteron 6380 which is maybe $150-200

16 cores may be overkill for the desktop even in this day and age. Server applications are designed to scale with more physical cores/processors, hence it's beneficial to have more.

I'd do some research on specifically what you are planning to run and how many core would be ideal. You may find diminishing returns after only 6-8 cores or even 4 cores depending on the game.

After reading that TPU article I checked the specs of mentioned Supermicro motherboard, and kaboom! It's limited to only PCI-e 2.0 x8.

There are motherboards with x16 2.0, but they are pricey.

It seems that Opteron is really not for gaming. Maybe for a workstation aimed at tasks not much dependent on PCI-e bandwidth.