Old HP Proliant tower servers make great Linux lab machines. Super reliable, great parts availability and upgradeable, also well supported by linux. I use an

Old HP Proliant tower servers make great Linux lab machines. Super reliable, great parts availability and upgradeable, also well supported by linux. I use an old ML 330 G6 with dual xeons and soon to have 64Gb of memory as a dev box. Fantastic for VMs and emulators, containerd etc. I did throw a cheap video card in it and dual 1Gb drives running the simplest raid available in the bios. It rocks. Current ebay price around $200 in working condition. Team it with a couple of charity shop monitors.