I’d like to explore making an upgradable workstation. I had trouble finding reliable information about building a custom dev workstation – most of the info targets gamers, whose main metric seems to be frame rate. Whereas, developers really care about build time. It would be interesting to dive into the differences between these workloads.
Here are some ideas I got from listening to the podcast:
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Maybe upgradability means a cutting-edge motherboard with extra RAM and storage slots. You’d want to pick a board that supports the latest generation of CPUs. For example, Intel’s current generation has 24-core CPUs; you might not buy that right now, but it would be a nice future option. It would need 96GB of RAM to meet Yocto’s guidance, which requires motherboard support.
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Choose DDR5 because it’s the future. However, people seem to have trouble deciding whether DDR4 or DDR5 is better for them. DDR4 typically has less speed and less latency than DDR5. I’m not sure how that relates to developers’ needs. Thoughts?
I’m currently running a 4 year old AMD Ryzen 3900X (12-core) with 64GB of RAM – currently does everything I need. I have re-used the same two ATX cases for 19 years, so it has been nice to not have to buy new cases with every computer.
I don’t keep up with specs – I usually just get what is current and replace everything except the power supply. If you only upgrade every 5 years or so, then everything is usually different, but perhaps the curve is leveling out and it will be more practical to re-use a motherboard over several generations of processors.
I currently like MSI for laptops and motherboards.
Building workstations from parts has worked very well – things typically go together with no problems and I can typically build a decent workstation for $1000 or so if the power supply and case can be reused. (inflation has likely kicked this up a bit in the last couple of years.) Computer parts are aimed at gamers, so they tend to be of fairly high quality.
Plus, you often get components with cool lights on them if you build your own 
