Budget high core count workstation help!

[Athena Kolva]

Budget (including currency): For the CPU(s), and motherboard only - $300 USD (the lower, the better)

Country: CA/US

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Blender, running multiple older games/dev tools at once, Sony Vegas Pro, Photoshop CS5, recording gameplay, Audacity etc. Basically a ton of multitasking, and a ton of storage drives. I hate sticking to one task and only one task!

 

Other details I'm extremely interested in AMD's ancient Opteron series, the price to thread/core count is absolutely insane.

My main question is where about are the limits, especially with like Windows 10, or 8.1 (Whichever you guys feel would best use the cores, and or multiple CPUs), Ideally I would absolutely LOVE to have one of those quad socket boards with the 8 or 16 core chips, however I'm getting a lot of conflicting information from friends and online, so would I be able to use all CPUs and cores, or if there is a workaround, how can I do that?

I'm also open to better alternatives, like a Xeon counterpart, a friend recommended the LGA 2011 platform, and those 12 core Xeons look lovely.

 

Thanks in advance everyone!

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Save mor money, then get better hardware then 17year old server componets. A 16c Opteron would het its ass handed to itself multipule times over by a 3600.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yea id stay away from those opterons, there slow in almost all workloads, and there aren't many good boards out for them. A 3600 will beat them in multithreaded workloads. Look at the ltt video. it was ok at blender rending(but your gpu is better and cheaper), and sucked at everything else.

 

 

Id probably go 3700x or 10700 here. You still want good single threaded performance for those tasks, as things like video encoding, blender modeling, photoshop all ling single threaded speeds. I have a dual xeon setup, nd they just really aren't that fast for most things today.

[sounds]

I know you'll get some good tips, and of course, I wish you good luck on your quest!

 

For me, the $300 price point is all about cutting every cost to the bone. If this isn't what you're after, sorry! I know you mentioned Opterons or Xeons, and those would have a cool retro vibe, if so go for it!

 

For me, I'd be looking to trade or bargain with someone I know who has a lot of equipment and might be willing to make you a deal. Result: no shipping costs, big discounts, and maybe you gain a friend in the process?

 

Here's hoping someone from the LTT Staff has a computer they're not using...

[Radium_Angel]

25 minutes ago, Athena Kolva said:

running multiple older games/dev tools at once

How do you play multiple games at once? Are you an octopus?

[Radium_Angel]

26 minutes ago, Athena Kolva said:

I'm also open to better alternatives, like a Xeon counterpart, a friend recommended the LGA 2011 platform, and those 12 core Xeons look lovely

I use Dell Precision workstations with twin Xeons. They are very lovely. 20 core/40 thread beasts with tons of ECC DDR3 RAM (which is *dirt* cheap. I just bought for a spare one, 16GB for 28$ US) in the 3.5Ghz range.

 

Granted, these are Ivy Bridge systems, but bang for the buck is hard to beat.

[Radium_Angel]

56 minutes ago, Athena Kolva said:

AMD's ancient Opteron series

As others have said, those CPUs are junk. 300$ for a high core count system can be had, but not new, given the current xmas insanity of pricing, where even modest new CPUs are beyond your budget.

The Dell T5610 can be had with dual Ivy Bridge Xeons, 6core/12threads each. Throw in a good video card and it's perfectly capable box. It'll hold (with some aftermarket Dell parts) 6 2.5" drives, and a PCIe slot or two still free for some non-bootable m.2 nVME storage. All depends on what parts you already have, as to what direction we can take you.

[Athena Kolva]

Partially I want something absolutely ridiculous, and be able to multitask like there's no tomorrow.

 

With running several games at once, an example perhaps, when I'm in PUBG and I die, I can tab out and mess around in GTA SA or something, instead of waiting for my friend/teammate to camp in a bush 10 miles away from the nearest enemy. (Though I honestly doubt an Opteron is going to run PUBG very well at all)

 

I just watched the LTT video, and while it is cool to have an absolutely ridiculous PC, you guys are more than correct, Opteron's performance is absolutely disgusting compared to even first gen threadripper, which completely demolishes Opteron.

 

As cool as it would be to have 4 CPUs and stuff, that performance is impressively nasty. 64 cores at best isn't even going to save it from getting absolutely embarrassed by a singular 1950X, I couldn't imagine the 2xxx or 3xxx series, or heck when the next gen threadripper launches