Seriously geeky to build your own. Buying makes more sense. Nothing I do ever makes much sense.
The county provided computer works fine for Pro. Dell Precision 7670 laptop w/32GB RAM
I built a desktop machine to use at home, did it several years ago, but overbuilt it so it still works just fine. I try to set up a system that's not the very top dollar, prices on CPUs typically drop dramatically when they are a year or so old so they are a better deal and I can use them for 10 years so it's almost sort of "cost effective".
The downside was that even though it's whip fast and way more than I need right now, Microsoft will not allow me to upgrade from Win10 to Win11. But Win10 is fine!
In my previous system I had a "Workstation" class "Quadro" graphics card that cost 4x as much as the gamer card and did not seem to do anything special. Gamer cards are fine.
The fastest possible storage device (NVME) is the most important component overall since GIS spends so much of its time moving files around. I ended up with a 500GB C: and 750GB SSD as a 😧 drive and a RAID 1 pair of old spinning drives for excess storage / backups.
Every possible detail on that computer is here, https://wiki.wildsong.biz/index.php?title=Murre
During COVID19 I used my home computer, got more done, no distractions, much more powerful computer... sigh... no "work from home" now. We are "essential". All our staff meetings are still done over Zoom even though we are all in the same building. Sigh... but I have to be in the building. Waa wahh wahh boo hoo. I have a 1.5 mile commute. LOL
