Care to go into a bit more on machine specs? I am interested in picking up a rig to do some LLM stuff and not sure where to get started. I also just need a new machine, mine is 8y-o (with some gaming gpu upgrades) at this point and It's That Time Again. No biggie tho, just curious what a good modern machine might look like.

Those Ryzen AI Max+ 395 systems are all more or less the same. For inference you want the one with 128GB soldered RAM. There are ones from Framework, Gmktec, Minisforum etc. Gmktec used to be the cheapest but with the rising RAM prices its Framework noe i think. You cant really upgrade/configure them. For benchmarks look into r/localllama - there are plenty.