rackmount vs tower for homelab inference: worth it?

[plainscope50]

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

The more I work with local setups, the more it seems like speculative decoding decides everything downstream.

Wondering if this is just where the whole space is heading now.

For context, I'm not chasing leaderboard numbers. I mostly want the system to feel consistent day to day.