Would get crushed doing HPC and would not be stable or data trustworthy. Lack of memory bandwidth, 24/7 operational reliability I could go on. Those gamer machines are fun for games but real work gets done on proper workstations (deskside supercomputers). Those cores get used.
memory bandwidth yes consumer machines run 24/7 without issues at all why do you think this is an issue
My trading rig runs on Dell Precision 5810 for which I paid $75 on eBay. (Video card and monitors extra, of course.) I can buy a TON of burritos with the money I saved!
Used to be mostly "some functions"... like ability to communicate with another CPU and generally would handle more RAM. Dell added Core iX a few years back and now even have some with Ryzen CPUs.
If you wanted a fast processor why go with Intel? Threadripper destroys any Intel workstation CPUs. The days of Intel beating AMD are over. The Xeon W7-3445 is half as fast as the Threadripper 7960X at $1500 vs. $2000. Passmark score is 84K vs. 42K. The 7970X runs 24 cores at 4.2 GHz vs the w7-3445 which runs 20 cores at 2.6 Ghz. Its not even close.