[rjh29]

You have to pay more for the CPU, mobo and DDR5 ram, so it's quite a tax right now. It depends on your workload of course, but if it's mostly GPU-bound (ML, gaming) I think the AM4 5800X3D is a really good choice that is destroying benchmarks and should last 4-5 years.

For GPU it depends on your vram needs, the Stable Diffusion stuff seems fine with 8, but Textual Inversion (adding yourself to the Stable Diffusion model, etc.) and text/transformers work needs more. I wanted the latter so I bought a used 3090 which was relatively cheap (compared to before, anyway!)

[dagw]

so it's quite a tax right now.

True, I guess it really depends on your workload. If you're not CPU bound and don't really expect to be, then getting the best CPU/mobo combo you can afford today and not worrying about upgrading might be the best way to go.

[tstrimple]

With Intel's latest release, I'm not sure AM5 is worth investing in at this point. Raptor Lake seems to crush AM5 with support from existing sockets and DDR4 all while being cheaper. That massively cooled my desire to go all in on a big AM5 system.