[danans]

A "beefy" workstation these days doesn't need to take a lot of space. For example the Intel NUC machines are pretty powerful and can fit in the palm of your hand.

I'm considering something like this for personal compute-intensive projects, or things that I want to continue running while my laptop is closed.

If your workload is really greater than a machine like that can handle, you should probably be considering some kind of cloud based compute option.

The only case I can think of where a really powerful local computer is required is the link stage of a huge monolithic binary, which by it's very nature is not parallelizable, but you'd never do that on the laptop anyways.