Hacker News Reader

I got an old Dell PowerEdge 610 server second hand on gumtree.com.au (classified ads page, I guess like craigslist or something?) for $400. The guy selling it had bought it for his home theater without realising that commercial servers are (a) noisy as hell, and (b) useless for graphics. :P It's been running our half-dozen server VMs at work for the past 3 years and it still blows my mind that you can get a server with 12 CPU cores and 96GB of RAM for that price.

Edit: 610, not 670, sorry. It basically sits in a corner making a faint whirring sound and apart from occasional apt-get upgrades I tend to forget it exists.

A mini PC would also give you 64GB and 12 cores. It consumes a lot less power.

Other than ECC RAM, any benefit?

The mini PC may not be as reliable, but this is not for production use.

If you're in a major city, look for salvage outlets. There are usually operations who recover decommissioned hardware from businesses, and then thrift-store style, sell it to hobbyists.

eBay? I don't know where you are in the world you are but in my country it's basically flooded with the stuff.