Jim suggested I update my thread with what I built. It is a monster. I bet it weighs 40 pounds or maybe more. It is heavy!
We (my company) do aerial photography and mapping for a living. We work with crazy big files. All the clients want a super high resolution, and larger and larger areas.
This the system: It is a Core i9 99609960X @ 3.10 GHz. 256 Gig of RAM. the boot drive is a 2TB M.2 drive and there is a second M.2 drive that is also a 2TB drive that is the "work" drive. It has a RAID5 system of five 4 TB drives and it formats out to 16,003,193,464 bytes or 14.5 TB. That is drive R.
It has two expensive video cards. This is a "image size" from Photoshop. The really annoying thing is Photoshop will happily load the image but refuses to save it in a TIFF format. Every imaged needs a bit of color or contrast tweaking, and we have to jump through hoops to edit monster images. The mapping programs will read and write large tif files happily.
This is just a tiny little bit of an entire city we are doing for the city. This junk yard is pretty much in the middle of town.
The ultimate reason I built this computer was for processing the raw imagery into the final photo-mosaic. The city project is comprised of almost 5,000 individual images, and each image 8688x5792. Previously our fastest computer was an i8 with only 64 gig of RAM. It took it 29 hours to do just one step of 15 steps of the processing. This new monster did the same thing in 11 hours, so less than 1/2 the time. On big projects like the city project the old system ran for two weeks. To do the same thing in less than a week is fantastic.