Yet another instance of John automatically assuming "more expensive = more betterer."
First, note he specifies "18-core i9." Looking up the list of Core i9 processors, there are only two that have 18 cores, one released in 2018 (ew, old) and one in 2019. And wouldn't you know it, in both cases those are the most expensive processors you can buy from those generations. Intel's supposedly releasing a new generation in the second half of this year, but John probably isn't aware of that, so I'd laugh if he bought an i9-10980XE thinking it was top of the line only for it to be out of date a couple months later.
A cursory Amazon search for LGA 2066 motherboards shows you can get one for about $200, but knowing John, he'll want to go for one with all the bells and whistles that's $500 or more, because again, more is betterer.
Finally, I know John would love to have one of Nvidia's
Quadro cards, running from $4000 on the "low" end all the way up to $9000 for the most expensive model. But maybe he'll settle for a
Titan RTX instead, which is
only $2500. John can be frugal, y'know!
The real kicker in all of this (aside from the fact that John can't gamedev) is that this proposed machine is
way overkill according to Epic's own recommendations, and his existing desktop would continue to work fine. From the
UE4 documentation:
John continues to believe that having better hardware will magically turn him into the gamedev superstar he always wanted to be. In reality, it would just end up collecting dust like every other project he's abandoned.
