Improve Engine Hardware - Parts List

Continuing with the previous post in this series, Improve Engine Hardware - Specs, the 'Advanced Chess' (serverchess.com) article from which I gathered the hardware specs, gave me another good lead:-

FirebrandX, a player and blogger on the Chess.com site, advises he's in the process of building a new computer for advanced chess. He revealed his list of components with the estimated street price of only $2325.

The list was part of a discussion about Best CPU for chess engine game analysis (chess.com; March 2013):-

I happen to be in the process of starting a new build. [...] I decided the Intel Hex core [Hexa] was the best way to go instead of the infinitely more expensive Xeon machines.

Another source of detailed information, with links to Amazon.com product pages (and some budget recommendations), is Best Computer Specs for a Chess Engine (castledrook.com; May 2017):-

Make sure that the CPU, motherboard, and RAM you choose are compatible with each other. You can do this by checking the socket information on the store page. [...] The CPU, motherboard, RAM, and cooling are all the most important, so budget most of your money towards those.

The following table gives a side-by-side comparison of those two sources for the 'most important' components.

	2013	2017
CPU	Intel i7-3930K Hex	Intel Boxed Core i7-6950X
Mobo	Asus P9X79	Asus Rampage V Extreme
RAM	Ram 64GB	G.Skill 64GB (4 x 16GB)
Cooling	Heat-sink/fan	Corsair H115i Liquid CPU Cooler

The Intel i7-3930 is a 6-core chip, the i7-6950 is a 10-core chip, and the budget recommendation i7-7700 is a 4-core chip. Wikipedia's Intel Core explains,

Intel Core is a line of mid-to-high end consumer, workstation, and enthusiast central processing units (CPU) marketed by Intel Corporation. These processors displaced the existing mid-to-high end Pentium processors of the time, moving the Pentium to the entry level, and bumping the Celeron series of processors to low end.

Identical or more capable versions of Core processors are also sold as Xeon processors for the server and workstation markets. As of June 2017, the lineup of Core processors included the Intel Core i9, Intel Core i7, Intel Core i5, and Intel Core i3, along with the Y - Series Intel Core CPUs.

As for the other recommendations, the table gives enough info for further investigation. At first I was puzzled why chess engine users would want to build their own systems from scratch. Then I realized that it's standard operating procedure in the larger community of gamers.