Here's something that will really rustle the jimmies of the FPS-watchers and ProL33t Gamers with no sense of objective value! I recently acquired some Zen2-based processors (two 3900Xs and a 3900XT), which is really nice since I did have a chance to play around with a 3950X a while back, but sold it because that part was really just too expensive for me at the time. I also had a 3700X, but Sash is Sash.
Anyway, the point of this post is for me to use the expression "Put your money where your mouth is"; if I am correct in my understanding, this expression has similar meaning to "practice what you preach". Ultimately, it is about not being a hypocrite.
Of course, the decision wasn't actually made just for me to make this post, I made the post because I'm really smug that I made the decision. You want to know what the decision is, don't you? Of course you do.
After assessing my equipment and their utility, I decided to dedicate my Zen2-based processors to compute, which due to their superior performance per watt over my 2nd generation (Zen+) parts, is a much better use of the hardware. Gaming, while technically running at a higher frame-rate in CPU-bound cases on the Zen2s, is not a time-sensitive workload and the frame-rate achieved by the 2nd-generation parts, even in CPU-bound scenes - is sufficient for a playable experience.
As such, I play most of my games on my Laptop with a Ryzen 5 2600X and Vega 56 (Mobile), or my other desktop with a Threadripper 2950X, in Local Mode (NUMA) - with compute suspended on one of the nodes (CPU dies) for gaming.
I enjoy gaming, I really do. But I don't consider it anywhere near the top of my list on priorities for CPU time. That said, the only games I actually play these days are Warframe and Fallout 76, maybe a bit of Deep Rock Galactic and Metro Exodus thrown in; and the latter there is the only game where I tend to want to use the RTX 2080 Ti, which is also doing something more worthwhile than gaming most days.
My usual games run just fine on the GTX 1650 SUPER, which, honestly, is all I need for gaming these days at 1080p. It's also the least efficient for compute, which makes it a perfect fit for sporadic, non-constant gaming workloads.
Meow.
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