M1 Mac Minis are cheaper than a CPU upgrade in many cases and offer native features and performance. I went almost a decade without recommending anything Apple, but the latest lineup is fantastic.
Not including work issued devices, I've got all AMD hardware right now. Anything prior to Intel 10th gen suffered from needing performance-tanking mitigations for their security design, and I haven't spent enough time digging in to find out if they've actually fixed it or are cheating again somehow. That was an expensive disaster, and we had to lifecycle a lot of Intel hardware early to make up for it.
Although I wish Epyc had been more available at the time, I'll say that replacing my PowerEdges with a single Threadripper has been worth it. I'd probably build around a high end Ryzen if I did it again, but there were conveniences to having NUMA on a single die. Just need an ASRock Rack motherboard if you want IPMI.
Not including work issued devices, I've got all AMD hardware right now. Anything prior to Intel 10th gen suffered from needing performance-tanking mitigations for their security design, and I haven't spent enough time digging in to find out if they've actually fixed it or are cheating again somehow. That was an expensive disaster, and we had to lifecycle a lot of Intel hardware early to make up for it.
Although I wish Epyc had been more available at the time, I'll say that replacing my PowerEdges with a single Threadripper has been worth it. I'd probably build around a high end Ryzen if I did it again, but there were conveniences to having NUMA on a single die. Just need an ASRock Rack motherboard if you want IPMI.