Which CPU gen are you suggesting, is there any writeup on such setup where <10K (not incl. power bill) cpu only rig is giving usable token speeds on latest SoTA open weights models?

In my experience with rig half that cost, entire exercise of running coding models locally has been a huge disappointment.

Cost/Value when compared to cloud services is just not there, but I see the merit for those who value privacy over quality of output and want a backup of huge condensed corpus of data within their control.

Kudos to OP though, They had clear goals and they achieved it.

I think there is a good sized population of people who absolutely don't want to submit everything they do to an off site service, or let their content be used for unknown training purposes, and will tolerate slowness at 1 to 10 tok/s as a tradeoff.

Or people who want or need to run an uncensored (abliterated) gguf file to deal with controversial topics that a paid LLM service will refuse to work with or ban you for.