Agreed, as well as the evolving nontrivial hunt for cost reductions e.g. "Just use spot instances in US west 1 on weekends", stuff like that. A pascal GPU and

Agreed, as well as the evolving nontrivial hunt for cost reductions e.g. "Just use spot instances in US west 1 on weekends", stuff like that. A pascal GPU and older CPU that takes at least 32GB RAM is a decent combination. I'm looking to upgrade to an older Xeon and a 1080 (price should be dropping any week now...) or 1080 Ti. Even the Sandy/ivy bridge i7's have not too bad results on most benchmarks: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/9 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700...