Core i9 and Quadro at the helm. The line between high-end desktop (HEDT) and workstation PCs has been blurring year on year. This is in no small part due to Intel using very similar technology on both fronts, with the latest Xeons and Core i9 chips armed with lots of cores and bags of performance. Run in a uniprocessor environment, there really is no good reason for many workstation users to look past the Core X series or, for that matter, the latest performance Threadripper chips from rival AMD.

GPU decisions are more contentious, as both Nvidia and AMD have professional ranges built on the guts of consumer technology. Often costing multiple times as much as their consumer cousins, these professional cards have ISV-certified drivers that excel at various workstation applications.

Thinking about the market as a whole, a thoroughly modern workstation in 2017 would likely take in an Intel Core X-series processor and Quadro graphics from Nvidia. We have such a system in from Scan Computers today - the 3XS WI6000 Viz - designed for high-end digital content creation.