I'm a big fan of mini PCs starting with the (now abandoned) Intel NUCs. Yes, some have soldered down parts but a lot don't. For ~$500 you can get a decent CPU,

I'm a big fan of mini PCs starting with the (now abandoned) Intel NUCs. Yes, some have soldered down parts but a lot don't. For ~$500 you can get a decent CPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and something like a Radeon 780M, which is no desktop GPU but it's surprisingly useful. Some even have Oculink connectors for external GPUs although I'm not sure how many people end up using this. You will find wildly varying networking connectivity like Wifi 6 vs 7, 1 or 2 Ethernet connectors that can be anything from 1GbE to 10GbE and a wide variety of different USB connectors and speeds. At $500 I really just don't care if it lasts forever. You can go more expensive and get a beefier CPU and/or GPU or go cheaper by going cheaper on both. I'm personally so over assembling PCs. I just want something that works.