The official wording about "Intel since Ice Lake" is sort of poorly phrased. Essentially, Comet Lake is a Skylake derivative which predates Ice Lake. Sky Lake doesn't have the SHA extensions (acceleration is the same thing, just different words). I've been using Sky Lake for testing FileCoin and it doesn't fare well with the PreCommit 1 phase (PC1) but does alright elsewhere. I have since ordered Rocket Lake and am going to try that out in a few days. All of this said, what you really want is Ice Lake SP which is being announced on April 6. 128 GB RAM is not enough for the workload and you will be hitting swap to commit even 1 sector. (Based on the benchmark, around ~143GB RAM is what's needed for working on a single 32GB sector.) I put my swap on my NVME RAID and that helps but truly, you'd want 256 GB to not have to deal with this and that needs a Ice Lake Xeon (to also get SHA) or AMD alternative.
Based on what I've seen, you'll want a video card with more than 8 GB of RAM and also a pretty high performance one, e.g. 10 GB+. I think a 3090 is really what you'd want. People on the high end are getting higher end professional cards that have 48 GB or more to do more in parallel. You don't absolutely need a video card right away if you have a high-powered CPU with a lot of cores. The parts of the workload that the GPU accelerates don't take as long as the PreCommit 1 phase in any case.
For NVME, you can get PCI-E riser cards and use those. I got 4 of them (they're cheap, $13). Then if you have the PCI-E slots, you can dedicate them for NVME (leaving one for a GPU). Amazon.com: M.2 NVME to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter with Aluminum Heatsink Solution: Computers & Accessories
Thanks, btw, for taking a stab at a config. I think a lot of people are in the dark about what's needed.
Depends on how many you want to add and how fast. gen 3 or 4?
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-Expansion-Card/dp/B084HMHGSP/ref=sr_1_10?crid=16CJHQICCTZA3&keywords=pcie+4.0x4+m.2+board&qid=1679622431&sprefix=pcie+4.0x+m.2+board%2Caps%2C488&sr=8-10&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.18ed3cb5-28d5-4975-8bc7-93deae8f9840
Hi, So you would need something like this to adapt the PCIE 4x to an M.2.
edit: Correction. I don't think that would work since the PCIE slot is only PCI 2.0x1 electronically. So I don't think its possible to use an M.2 drive.