[71bw]

    >and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks

Which sadly happens quite a lot with ECC DDR4 for whatever reason.

    >If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable

The T5810 is a known machine, very tinkerable, just works with NVMe adapters (they show up as a normal NVMe boot option in UEFI) and even have TPM 2.0 (!!!) after a BIOS update. Overall, they are the 2nd best affordable Haswell-EP workstations after the HP Z440 in my opinion.

    >E5 v4 revision CPU

They are less efficient than V3 CPUs due to the lockdown of Turbo Boost, but then again on a Precision you'd have to flash the BIOS with an external flasher regardless to get TB back.

[snerbles]

Forgot about Dell gimping Turbo Boost on that firmware.

Another route is the PowerEdge T440 (tower server), which does respect Broadwell-EP turbo logic without a reflash. Not quite as quiet as a workstation, though.

[71bw]

It's not an issue with Dell it's an issue with how the chips themselves are designed. There are buggy microcodes in the Haswell-EP series which can be exploited to unlock FULL Turbo Boost on ALL cores of the CPUs. This is NOT possible on Broawdwell-EP.