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If you don't care about your electricity bill, you can buy used Xeon workstations on your favorite auction site.

A couple years ago, we picked up a HP Z800 workstation with two 12-core processors and 24GB of RAM for $400.

The main downside is that if the power supply (proprietary) or motherboard die, there's not easy fix for it other than buying another of the same model.

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Absolutely!

I wanted something to host my private and experimental stuff. A friend of mine who tracks used server auctions pointed me at some servers that were Dell systems clearly custom built for one of the large SV companies. I paid $450 for a box with 72GB of RAM and 16 cores. At that price, I just bought a second one for spares. Which I haven't needed to use in the 4 or 5 years I've been using it.

It has been great.

Would you care to share the server auction site? I've thought about doing something like that.

This was 4+ years ago, so I have no idea of the current market, but I bought from this eBay vendor:

http://stores.ebay.com/deepdiscountservers

WeirdStuff also used to be great for this.

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