Suggestions on upgrade path while staying with a Supermicro SC846 chassis?

[montery]

Hi everyone, I'm hoping I can tap into the collective wisdom here for a upgrade project!

 

My existing server is rock-solid wonderful, extremely happy with it and it does nearly everything I need it to do.  Except... It's getting a little old, and upgraditis is starting to set in.  I'd like to play with adding a GPU or two, and give it some oompf for transcoding the occasional film that the CPUs can't easily do by themselves.   That's my primary use case, with maybe some remote rendering for blender eventually.

 

I'm okay with spending money on this beast, and I'd like to be conscious about power consumption when idle (when under load, I don't care, I want it all baby!!).  I'm happy to look at hardware 2 - 3 years old -- in fact, I kinda prefer it as it makes troubleshooting easier.   I'd also like to upgrade the HBA + Backplane to get it up full SATA speed (currently the HBA is a LSISAS3081E-R, limited to 3 gbit/s).  So suggestions on a HBA would be a bonus.

 

I'm looking to upgrade motherboard + CPU + ram, and possibly powersupply (currently a R1000-TQ) so that may limit my options.

 

Thanks in advance!

[flinte]

Im in your same boat.  I would like to just move to a single CPU consumer grade Ryzen with ECC memory but open to a newer Xeon solution. 

[theDrell]

So. I just ordered a bunch of stuff for this chassis without thinking. 
 

what did you guys discover?

[onyx00]

I have a new 847 waiting to be populated so interested to hear what others are thinking.

 

My initial reaction is to go with Xeon for the PCI lanes as I suspect that will benefit with 30+ drives, yes?  No plex needs now as I have another system for that.  Really looking for the best bang for the buck on Xeon platform.