Hello,
Aside for gaming, which I understand the need for high end and high performance graphics cards, are they needed to allow a high end CPU, like AMD 9950 x3d, AMD Threadripper or AMD Epyc CPU to perform its best, even though it would NOT BE in a gaming environment or graphics rendering, but rather more in quant number crunching? I just don’t want to hold back a high end CPU by not getting a gaming GPU etc. Sorry for a seemingly stupid question. Thoughts?
Generally, if you need a high end GPU, you’ll know it… Rendering, encoding, LLMs. Outside of specific workloads high end cards are not more useful than basic iGPU. You can always add one later. Don’t sweat it.
You’d want to get a GPU, that meets your software/program expectations
Since it is a add-on card, so you can go shop around, in the meantime
You can still build out the system, and get it initially setup [whether with simple GPU or iGPU]
AFAIK Software like Matlab can be made to take advantage of GPUs, it is a case of “you know you need one, or you don’t need one”.
If you need to run your 3 monitors and the onboard VGA is not enough, you are in the “need one”-camp.
I have a worstation Radeon Pro W5500 (8 GB), currently running 4 monitors. But against some ridiculous gaming GPUs it isn’t all that great perhaps. But like I’m saying, "Not with GAMING as a consideration, it won’t hold back CPU performance correct?
Depends entirely on the software you are running. Just moving the GPU you have over to the new machine should be fine, can still swap it out later.
As long as the GPU can handle all the graphics tasks to display what you want to see on your monitors, you won’t be holding back the CPU. The only time* a slow GPU “holds back” a CPU is if there’s too much going on graphically, and the CPU has to do some of the rendering.
I think that people are saying that you may be able to get better performance if your software can take advantage of the GPU for its calculations, in which case a fast GPU might be a good upgrade.
*Well, most of the time. 
Got it guys, thank you! Yeah at this point, GPU is just for graphical processing, with no other calculations sent to the GPU on purpose,
I’ve finally found someone running the same gpu as me. Did you also have crashing on booth with the 24q4 AMD pro driver? I’ve rolled back to 24q2 and it’s now stable but wasn’t sure why there were errors with the newer driver.
WRT your original post, I run a 5900X, SMT off, PBO on; this is for simulation (FE, CFD) and I have no issues with graphic performance. Unless a task specifically uses gpu compute, which is usually either a different license or targeting compute to the gpu, there is no need for a powerful gpu alongside a powerful cpu.