Workstation C with $600 USD of upgrades in April, 2021
--$360 11700K @ 5.0ghz
--$200 ASRock W480 Creator (onboard 10G net, TB3, etc.)
Borrowed from my 9900K until prices drop:
--32GB of G.Skill DDR4 3200 ($100 on Black Friday...)
Reused from same Tower Case that housed the Xeon:
--Used VEGA 56 GPU ($200 on eBay before mining craze...)
--Noctua Cooler, 750W PSU, OS SSD, LSI RAID Controller, SATAs, etc.

Performs VERY close to my overclocked 9900K (below), but at stock settings with no tweaking...

Workstation D with $1,350 USD of upgrades in April, 2019
--$500 9900K @ 5.0ghz
--$140 Corsair H150i liquid cooling with 360mm radiator (3 fans)
--$200 open box Asus Z390 WS (PLX chip manages 4/5 PCIe slots)
--$160 32GB of G.Skill DDR4 3000 (added another 32GB later...)
--$350 refurbished, but like-new Radeon Vega 64 LQ (liquid cooled)

Renders Vegas11 "Red Car Test" (AMD VCE) in 13s when clocked at 4.9 ghz
(note: BOTH onboard Intel & Vega64 show utilization during QSV & VCE renders...)

Source Video1 = 4TB RAID0--(2) 2TB M.2 on motherboard in RAID0
Source Video2 = 4TB RAID0--(2) 2TB M.2 (1) via U.2 adapter & (1) on separate PCIe card
Target Video1 = 32TB RAID0--(4) 8TB SATA hot-swap drives on PCIe RAID card with backups elsewhere

10G Network using used $30 Mellanox2 Adapters & Qnap QSW-M408-2C 10G Switch
Copy of Work Files, Source & Output Video, OS Images on QNAP 653b NAS with (6) 14TB WD RED
Blackmagic Decklink PCie card for capturing from tape, etc.
(2) internal BR Burners connected via USB 3.0 to SATA adapters
Old Cooler Master CM Stacker ATX case with (13) 5.25" front drive-bays holds & cools everything.

Workstations A & B are the 2 remaining 6-core 4.0ghz Xeon 5660 or I7 980x on Asus P6T6 motherboards.

$999 Walmart Evoo 17 Laptop with I7-9750H 6-core CPU, RTX 2060, (2) M.2 bays & (1) SSD bay...