We have been running Phoenix Touch on a system built in 2018 or so:

* Supermicro X10DAi
* Dual Xeon E5-2680 14 Core 2.4GHz (2012 release date, so, very old)
* 64GB DDR4/2133 ECC RAM

Performance has been ...ok. But caching is painfully slow. Our cache disk is a RAID 0 made up of 8x 4TB drives and is capable of 25fps 10bit DPX playback, according to the built in Phoenix speed test tool. But even when rendering from the cache, we never see speeds close to that.

I did some tests to see if we could cache to ProRes or EXR instead, in order to move the cache drive to a smaller and much faster NVME RAID, but found that the CPUs were pegged at 100% when doing that, and the overall performance was lower than DPX caching (which runs at about 2.2 fps for 4k DPX. Makes sense - ProRes and EXR are more CPU intensive than DPX. 

So it seems the thing we need to do here is upgrade the computer. I'm thinking of this: 

* Supermicro X11DAi-N
* Dual Xeon Gold 6154 18-Core 3.00GHz (2nd gen, 2017 CPUs)
* 64GB DDR4/2666 ECC RAM

Yes, this is a couple generations old. i know for sure it'll be faster - more cores, faster clock, newer processors (14nm vs 32nm), faster motherboard, and faster RAM. But the question is - will this improve things substantially? The total cost to upgrade the machine to these specs will be about $2k since we can re-use the GPU and other components we're currently using, which is a lot less than building a new Ryzen or current-generation Xeon machine. Obviously it won't be as fast as a current one, but will it be enough?