It’s not always about the best but it is always about the right fit for your applications. With that in mind, answering the following three questions will help you narrow down the choices available to you.

✅Are you brand agnostic? Being brand agnostic means that you can explore the entirety of the market rather than just a subset of it. There’s no real reason to be brand agnostic these days (unless if you are an Apple user, in which case, you will probably need to stick with your Mac workstation). On the contrary, big brands tend to be more conservative than others when it comes to component choices; which explains why some smaller vendors have adopted AMD’s Epyc server CPUs.
✅ What is your budget? Knowing how much you can spend will inform what you can choose. In theory, any PC can be a workstation but some of their features (e.g. Windows 11 Pro, after sales support, enhanced expansion capabilities beefier components) means that desktop workstations are generally more expensive although deals can be had. You can get good all-rounder workstations for around $500 but you will have to fork out up far more (several orders of magnitude) for something like AI development.
✅ What sort of support do you need? Standard warranty will not cut it in most cases for professionals and businesses that reply on their workstations to work. This is where the big brands, with their extensive after sales network have the upper hand and can offer accidental coverage, next business day support and more.
✅ What applications do you plan to run? Different applications require different types of workstations. 3D rendering requires a powerful GPU, whereas machine learning and data science need as much memory as they can. Your toolbox will determine what sort of workstation will fit the bill.

So there we have the four questions you should ask yourself when choosing the right workstation for the job. Just bear in mind that there’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to which question comes first.