I wanted ECC, got a 2015 Xeon 4c/8 Thread E3-1230 v5 (cheaper than the i7 of the time), 32gb ECC ram, gtx1070, and a SSD. It's been reliable and fast. I think

I wanted ECC, got a 2015 Xeon 4c/8 Thread E3-1230 v5 (cheaper than the i7 of the time), 32gb ECC ram, gtx1070, and a SSD. It's been reliable and fast. I think I paid $1,500 for it (not including 2 27" 2560x1440 monitors). I do admit to upgrading from a small SATA SSD to a larger M.2 NVMe SSD which did seem to make boost some things nicely. Especially working with large directories of audio, video, photos. Had a few friends buy $2k-$3k laptops around then, all of which have been replaced years ago. Building software (unless it's a big Rust project) is quick enough to not care. Occasional gaming (random steam games, warzone 2100, even valheim) seems fine full screen. Even watching 4k downscaled to 2560x1440 seems fine. Sure 7 years later I'm considering an upgrade, but not sure I'm going to notice. A zillion terminals and chrome tabs don't seem to slow it down at all. Looking for PCIe-5, DDR5 (twice as many channels), and a mid range Alder lake, or the coming out later this year zen 4. I would like ECC so I'm leaning towards an alder lake flavored Xeon (when they come out), or a Zen 4 desktop or laptop. Or maybe a SFF (typically laptop parts in a small desktop case with a integrated GPU). The new "zen3+ and RDNA2" chips sound like plenty for the next 8 years.