This is why I built a Ryzen 5950x system. Best performance per watt. I am hoping power consumption will come down again before I need the next upgrade.

If I had 2,000 pounds to spend. I would go build a machine with i-7 Broadwell Extream CPU, 32 G Bytes Ram. For the hard dive, I would get 2 Intel 750 SSDs and put them in a RAID configuration

I bought a Dell XPS 3 years ago. On sale for about $1,000 U.S. Has i7 8 GB ram, 1 TB Hard drive. I use the machine on site for contract work. You don't want a laptop. The CPUs in them have about 1/2 the power. When my coworkers noticed, they all demanded that their agencies supply them with desktop computers. I have since upgraded the memory to 16 G bytes. Needed that to run VMs. The machine used up about 75% of the memory with VMs running. And ran noticably slower. Also added a 2nd 1 T Byte hard drive. Just to keep code on different drive than OS. Going to replace the HDD with 525 G Byte SSD that I found on NewEgg for little over $100 U.S. If I were to replace it today and need it fast, would be hard to beat Dell XPS. I been thinking about a new build. Considering a Skylake i7. But Brodwell i7 or i7 Extream I think would be better suited. Reviews of CPUs for compiling code is hard to come by.

Only problem I have with it is that .Net 5 is not included.