Stop trying to hit me and hit me. You may have made a lot of attempts to find the best hardware to speed up your SQL Sever. Rumors say that there is no one-size-fits-all hardware configuration. Although it might be true, you can be sure that the following configuration fits almost any SQL load. Approved by thousands of SQL Server instances running at AppOnFly SQL.
Dell PowerEdge R740xd
2x Xeon Gold 6244 3.6GHz, 8C/16T, Max Turbo 4.4GHz
1536GB RAM, 2666MT/s LRDIMMs
BOSS controller card (2x 240GB RAID 1)
PERC H740P RAID Controller, 8Gb NV Cache
12x 3.84TB SSD PM883 (Max 24 HDD/SSD, incl. 12 NVMe)
Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply (1+1), 1100W
iDRAC9,Enterprise
Broadcom 57416 2 Port 10Gb Base-T + 5720 2 Port 1Gb Base-T
2x Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro Dual Port 10 GbE SFP+
Good to know:
Server Dell PowerEdge R740xd is the most powerfull 2-socket Dell server ever made (may 2020).
Xeon Gold 6244 is the most powerfull 8-core intel CPU at the time.
Sure you might not need as much memmory as we use at AppOnFly, safely lower the amount to fit your need. Always remember the right memmory channels alingments.
Use BOSS card for hypervizor and set number of SSDs to fit your capcacity. 4 is recommended minimum. Use only mirroring RAID1/10 and forget about RAID5/6 configurations.
Integrated 10Gbs Broadcom NIC is good, although Mellanox rocks. 2 cards are simply for redundancy.
Looks like too expensive boy with more then usable horsepower? Spin up your SQL Server at AppOnFly for the fraction of the cost.