As an update, I bought some 3900's. I'll keep yall posted.
Monero Mining
For me, I'm mining at a loss on a small scale. Even though I'd love to get a proper rig set up, the price of hardware is too high to ever get an ROI worth investing in - that is compared to simply buying the XMR. So I'll continue putting XMRig on any device that can run it, and have old laptops ticking away just to support the network in a small way. Would still be interested in updates on your rig, and if XMR moons, I'll put it right back into a mining rig! Sidenoet, it's possibly worth cross-linking this community to r/moneromining as there's an active community there. Useful to have up to date info on pools, difficulty, rigs etc.
Non existent. There's no profit in monero mining unless you have a xeon/epyc rig. I heard the 7600x are going on sale with a $200 price drop, so that might work, but I'm using a 3700x and it would take a year at 7,000H/S to make 1 XMR doing PPS, solo would be even longer. Use a hash rate profit calculator. I'm mining scala and pulsar with avian/bitoreum/raptoreum/kaspa/alephium/ironfish rotating. I'm not mining monero until I get a EPYC rig. You need 2MB of L3 cache per core as a rule of thumb to mine Monero. Run xmrig as administrator, enable large page file sizes and use quad channel memory and you'll be fine. Xmrig.com has a wiki on optimization of xmrig for mining XMR.
Arnt epycs like close to 1k each for 50kh/s at best? even on dual socket that'll be beat in value by a consumer 3900/3900x rig. 2 year roi without electricity, and you keep the parts. not too bad for a hobby.