Like others have said, the fans of a 1U are going to be LOUD. Consider a 2U. DDR3 and older DDR4 Xeons are cheap but power hungry and slow. Compare costs with

Like others have said, the fans of a 1U are going to be LOUD. Consider a 2U. DDR3 and older DDR4 Xeons are cheap but power hungry and slow. Compare costs with a more modern system, like a decent Ryzen. Saving the money on the older system might not be worth it, when you take power and noise in to account. I bought a Ryzen 2700X on sale a couple of years ago for large compile jobs. I chose an ASRock motherboard because most if not all support ECC, and I got some ECC memory. It has been absolutely wonderful to have a machine dedicated for CPU intensive tasks.