> So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28

That's a very specific date / timeline. How do you decide to do a full new buy? I ask because I own a desktop that I built 15 years ago which I was flirting with replacing completely last year, but unfortunately I didn't pull the trigger ... oops :(

My old rig is still going strong. The motherboard can only take up to 32GB DDR3 though. CPU is an Intel i7-4790k which is still very fair today if you are not running a resource hog OS (looking at you Windows). Overall it is completely serviceable for my needs. Being honest with myself the only reason I wanted to upgrade was for nerd cred but I don't game much anymore and don't do any ML tasks that require lots of local compute.

My PC is similar. I upgraded it to a 4790k a few years ago (best CPU on the socket). What's funny is I also maxed out the RAM as well because I realised two more 8GiB sticks were like £30 so why not. I thought it was a funny thing to do at the time as I didn't really need that much, but glad I did now. It's going to have to do me for many more years to come, but I'm fine with that. I don't game at all. Just have to hope nothing fails. I did build it with solid foundations: good and overprovisioned PSU, Asus mobo, so here's hoping.

Unfortunately I do also have server gear now as well. I'm going to have to really think about what I actually need now...