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Away from the specs, what's your legal position as an employee using a personal machine? What's the risk of you being held responsible for something going wrong as it is your setup?
Obviously you're very IT savvy but there does seem to be a higher risk of the device being compromised if it's used as a do everything device. Explaining to a client that their data was exposed due to a bug in Steam or something could be awkward.
aggi-
I don't have customer or employee data on my machine. Compliance requirements (even FedRAMP) don't yet understand "data inside a web browser" as it's all still aligned to "files on disc" which I do not have.
The code is all OSS, and that which isn't... well we're globally remote and have a BYOD policy that continues to adopt non-corp machines and devices. The key part remains, nothing about a customer leaves the prod environment. No secrets or keys are in any repo either... so even though most of our Cloud stuff is OSS, nothing there can be compromised as the keys aren't held by engineers.
Basically we treat people like responsible adults, the systems were designed with that in mind, and so this stuff is fine.
If any of this ever does apply... I'll continue to use the Windows machine for the day-to-day stuff and I have a bling MBP to fall back to for anything "sensitive".
Velocio
Thinking of building a new PC.
Could wait a year and get my employer to contribute $3k, but could also just pull the trigger.
What I'm using at the moment is an "OMEN by HP 875-1008na"... which cost me £1.6k and has an Intel i7-9700k, 16GB RAM and GeForce RTX 2080 Super. Purchased as a relatively cheap gaming PC at the beginning of the pandemic, I've absolutely got a lot of value out of it. Also, due to my really bad experience with my MacBook Pro (which now gathers dust) and discovering Windows 11's ability to run Linux... I now live on a Windows machine.
My use of this one PC is on 16h per day and I'm using it for gaming, transcoding, editing video webinars, 12h of meetings once a week (really heavy video conferencing), music, coding, photographic processing (RAW from 40Megapixel sensor, batch processing), etc.
Where I find my existing PC limited:
It's basically what it is... good value for the price point, got a hell of a lot of use out of it... but it's really not upgradeable at all and as I'm using it way more than I intended to I am feeling that.
So I want to consider something that is air-cooled (with ability to have fans stop or run slow when idle and not required), full Thunderbolt, at least two NVMe slots, potential for video capture improvements, a GPU that could in theory be fine with 4k or higher, ECC RAM (at least the option for it even if initially I'll just load it up with non-ECC).
I'll start by determining what a stupid version of this looks like, and will "value engineer" down to a palatable price point later.
My first draft thoughts have gone this way:
First pass, comes out around £3.5k but a lot of that is the GPU and RAM, the rest feels reasonably good for what it is.
Could drop the motherboard down to a gaming one, but I super appreciate the cooling on it and the fact that it comes with 2 x 40Gbps Thunderbolt in addition to an abundance of USB3, and two ethernet which are a 10G and 2.5G one.
This is a lot of money... but this is also 16h per day and my livelihood and recreation. It doesn't feel wild to invest in that.