10980XE dual boot gaming build

[Voodoo Rufus]

Sup folks. I've been watching 10980XE chips and mainboards on eBay, and could snag the CPU for $350 and a nice Asus x299 Strix E 2 for $150 or so. I was thinking of overlocking to the high 4ghz or maybe 5ghz on it and dual booting win7 Ultimate and win10 just for fun. But it's not like any game I would play from the win7 era would utilize 18 cores at all. Four if I was lucky. Besides the cool factor (and heat lol!), what else could I do with it? Super beefy NAS?

I could run my 1080ti kingpins in SLI on it as another option with a full 16 lanes for each. Still silly, though.

 

[unsafesteagle]

Bare metal virtual machine
NAS
Media Server
Development

Network Card 8x pcie lanes
GPU 8 x pcie lanes
Hyper storage m.2 16 x pcie lanes

large rackmount chassis for additional RAID SATA

 

[Woomack]

If it were me, I would look for 1/2-gen Threadrippers. There are somehow fewer problems with memory slots and the heat. You can also search for 1/2 gen Epyc. I'm only unsure if you find any cheap motherboard.

 

[Voodoo Rufus]

It looks like decent Threadripper enthusiast boards are $200-250+ still. Some decent combos out there.

I also don't have a waterblock that will fit those boards, but my unused Optimus V2 would bolt up to X299 nicely, plus I have some extra custom loop gear that would do nicely.

This would probably get installed in my old Fractal R6 for cooling, which currently has my Z390 Windows 7 build.

 

[Woomack]

But it's not like any game I would play from the win7 era would utilize 18 cores at all. Four if I was lucky. Besides the cool factor (and heat lol!), what else could I do with it? Super beefy NAS?

I could run my 1080ti kingpins in SLI on it as another option with a full 16 lanes for each. Still silly, though.

It looks like you want a toy, and you're probably wasting money on a rig that won't be used. I have weird ideas from time to time too and I waste way too much money on pretty stupid things. For example, I built a 2 CPU server that I'm barely using right now.
You already said that it's a bad idea for gaming. As a NAS, it's a waste of electricity, and you still need a lot of storage to build it (that will cost more than everything else in this PC).
Maybe just focus on something new. That Optimus block will be compatible with any new Intel CPU.

 

[Voodoo Rufus]

Yup, I want a toy.....reason dictates this is dumb and I have plenty of hardware that does the job already.

The wife also would appreciate me selling two motherboards for every one I want to get. It really is a fair request.