Ultra 9 285K or 14900K.

OMG I literally just went through this exact same process! It is such a blast picking out parts for a workstation. Honestly, when I moved from my old 4-core laptop to my current desktop setup, the difference in my dev workflow was just insane. I used to have to close Chrome just to run a single VM without the whole system lagging, but now I can have Docker containers, a bunch of IDE windows, and a game running in the background and it doesnt even break a sweat. It totally changed how I work because I stopped being afraid of heavy tasks. If youre looking for hard data, you absolutely need to browse the Phoronix test suite results. They are amazing for seeing how different architectures handle code compilation and real-world dev tools. I also spent a ton of time on the Puget Systems blog because they do these deep-dive technical analyses on workstation hardware that are way more useful for us than your average gaming review. Seriously, check those out before you decide on anything!