It’s worth pointing out that there’s a very good reason these high spec servers are so cheaply available. It’s not because they are junk or even that old. It’s that most of these servers in data centres run virtualisation software to support cloud computing. With 2 CPU licenses of VMware costing upwards of £15K and SNS support costing another £1K per year it is only worth running on the most compute and memory efficient tin boxes there are.
With the price of data centre rack space being what it is it’s more than worthwhile swapping out servers once they are 3 years old (sometimes 18 months) and considering that the boxes that are removed were of the highest spec when new there are some cracking bits of kit out there.
These cpu refresh cycles are done by the 1000SqM so as you can imagine there are always a few out there and the resale value is nothing.
(VMware VCP for the last 11 years).
I have been out of IT for a few years but still keep my hand in on our own servers. Virtualisation is great. Just set up a new server running Hyper V - then running 4 of our old servers on it.