Depending on what your usage requirements are, Mac Minis running UMA over RDMA is becoming a feasible option. At roughly 1/10 of the cost you're getting much much more than 1/10 the performance. (YMMV)
https://buildai.substack.com/i/181542049/the-mac-mini-moment
I did not expect this to be a limiting factor in the mac mini RDMA setup ! -
> Thermal throttling: Thunderbolt 5 cables get hot under sustained 15GB/s load. After 10 minutes, bandwidth drops to 12GB/s. After 20 minutes, 10GB/s. Your 5.36 tokens/sec becomes 4.1 tokens/sec. Active cooling on cables helps but you’re fighting physics.
Thermal throttling of network cables is a new thing to me…