I just built one partly for this purpose. I went with AMD's new Ryzen 1700. It has 8 cores and 16 threads. More threads are great if your application can use th

I just built one partly for this purpose. I went with AMD's new Ryzen 1700. It has 8 cores and 16 threads. More threads are great if your application can use them. My understanding is that TensorFlow, for example, does[1]. i7s do better in applications that only use a single thread, but you get a really good cost/performance ratio for multi-threaded work from Ryzen [2]. The 1700 also comes with a serviceable air cooler, so you save some money there too. The other components are a geforce 1060, Asus Prime X370-pro (lowest-priced x370 motherboard), and 16gb ram. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39395198/configuring-tensorflow-to-use-all-cpus https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39395198/configuring-ten... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-ryzen-1700&num=3 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-ryze... edit: added other specs