Fastest threadripper on the market is usually a good bet. Worth considering mini-pc on vesa mount / in a cable tray + fast machine in another room.

Also, I've got a gmktec here (cheaper one playing thin client) and it's going to be scrapped in the near future because the monitor connections keep dropping. Framework make a 395 max one, that's tempting as a small single machine.

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arp242 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Threadripper is complete overkill for most developers and hella expensive especially at the top end. May also not even be that much faster for many work-loads. The 9950X3D is the "normal top-end" CPU to buy for most people.

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JonChesterfield 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Whether ~$10k is infeasibly expensive or a bargain depends strongly on what workloads you're running. Single threaded stuff? Sure, bad idea. Massively parallel set suites backed by way too much C++, where building it all has wound up on the dev critical path? The big machine is much cheaper than rearchitecting the build structure and porting to a non-daft language.

I'm not very enamoured with distcc style build farms (never seem to be as fast as one hopes and fall over a lot) or ccache (picks up stale components) so tend to make the single dev machine about as fast as one can manage, but getting good results out of caching or distribution would be more cash-efficient.

	▲	arp242 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes of course it depends, which is why I used "most developers" and not "all developers". What is certainly it not is a good default option for most people, like you suggested.

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zozbot234 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Different class of machines, the Threadripper will be heavier on multicore and less bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, which is nice for some workloads (e.g. running large local AIs that aren't going to fit on GPU). The 9950X and 9950X3D may be preferable for workloads where raw single-threaded compute and fast cache access are more important.