I picked up a Dell R820 with quad 8-core (E5-4650L) and 96GB (24x4GB) RAM for USD$700 in March this year. Because of the memory mezzanines, it’s only half full

I picked up a Dell R820 with quad 8-core (E5-4650L) and 96GB (24x4GB) RAM for USD$700 in March this year. Because of the memory mezzanines, it’s only half full in this configuration. And if I find a decent deal on E5-46xx V2s at some point I could get up to 96 threads. I even managed to get it to boot from a PCIe NVME drive with an internal USB stick running the Clover bootloader (yes, the Hackintosh bootloader) to bootstrap into Ubuntu. It makes for a great VM server. Also helps that iDRAC 7 is aeons ahead of the horrible iDRAC 6 servers I was using before.