It's true that I left that out. It's not entirely clear to me whether the budget is unlimited or not in the God Box. Back in 2004 you could go higher budget than they did with the Opteron 850, but the market wasn't as clearly segmented as it is today.
> Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs
I hadn't realized that. There are 32GB ECC UDIMM's on the market (e.g. https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd-samsung-1x-32gb-...), but that raises the price to around $2k.
> If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install into the tower directly
Yes, but we're talking smart money, At the time, the NAS didn't exist, and with 10Gbe, the bandwidth is high enough to make it not worth keeping in-case.
I personally think the sweet spot is somewhere in the $2k-$3k range. That gets you 16 cores, 128GB ECC, 2TB NVME, 10Gbe, RTX 2070/2080