I have two servers I use regularly although I have moved them out of my house recently. I didn't find the fan noise or power usage bad. Startup fan noise on a

I have two servers I use regularly although I have moved them out of my house recently. I didn't find the fan noise or power usage bad. Startup fan noise on an HPE server is bad but with decent airflow they are pretty quiet really. Server specs can be different but it might work to your advantage, my HPE servers can use registered ram, are super easy to upgrade and walk all over my older i7 based laptop for compile speeds on big projects. I buy from techbuyer or ebay. Note that the drive arrays might be SAS rather than SATA, and windows 10 won't install on a fat multi cpu server as the license doesn't permit it, so if you are running windows you will have to install windows server instead. If you need docker like I do, it ended up being better to install debian and use qemu to run windows stuff. Get dual power supplies. A lot of these servers have lived in data centres and the caps in the power supplies may have silently failed, but you won't know until you try to turn it on. The power supplies are hot swap usually and run to $25 dollars so I keep one on the shelf. The deskside server I bought is an absolutely kick ass workstation usinga very cheap ati hd6570 and a couple of 2k monitors. Its fast (dual 6 core xeon @3 ghz), super reliable, 96gb of memory. Using a pair of hybrid drives in raid 0 for storage. The other one is a rack server on a big SSD and it is even better but less convenient as a workstation so I use it as a build machine and for hosting VMs. I would never go back to buying a deskside PC. I am under $1000 invested in those two beasts and to try to get the same performance you are lookung at $5000 and climbing. I recommend old servers unreservedly. https://www.techbuyer.com/au/ https://www.techbuyer.com/au/