I don't find any of these workstations really interesting. They are all the same x86_64 architecture so just getting the latest and greatest puts you leagues ah

I don't find any of these workstations really interesting. They are all the same x86_64 architecture so just getting the latest and greatest puts you leagues ahead. I find the really old workstations to be way more interesting. You rarely see a MIPS, Sparc, PA-RISC anymore. Once the CPU wars were over (Intel won, btw) you could get old SGI supercomputers, DEC Alphas, Sun Sparcstations, and NeXT Turbo Cubes for almost nothing. My very first website was run from an Alpha workstation on NetBSD under my dorm room bed. They were power hungry, not state of the art, and sometimes quirky to use (Irix Motif comes to mind) but they were a blast.