i was recently consulting a colleague on his homelab who was building some large/power-hungry setup on threadripper with enough ram to store many bluerays in ramdisk (hah!).

we were planning out the tier1-hypervisor deployment and subsequent vms/storage system(s) and i made the comment of, "you must have a lot of people in your lab or friends". he said it was just for him.

i tend not to judge, but when you're pushing ~200w idle and with all of your fleet deployed your cpu/ram are not even touching the ~30% mark this is a heavy overprovision scenario.

meanwhile i'm running my entire life/experiments on a chinese 4c/4t box from lenovo with 16gb of rams and the only splurge a 2tb ssd.

if it makes him happy, great. but i don't think it's necessary to build a superpowered machine to handle sub 5 rq/h cycles