In the past I've built servers by carefully selecting parts, calculating maximum power usage versus airflow, calculating full time electrical load, building, te

In the past I've built servers by carefully selecting parts, calculating maximum power usage versus airflow, calculating full time electrical load, building, testing with fans disabled in rooms with high ambient temperatures, looking for failure modes, researching failure rates of specific power supplies and drives, et cetera. I'd build one or two, test them for several months while making adjustments and fixing various weaknesses, then I'd build ten, twenty, however many were needed. One particular client decided they wanted to skip all that and just spend the money on Dell. They didn't have many servers, certainly not enough to justify a separate server room. Their offices weren't air conditioned at night, and they had an entire summer where one server or another would become unresponsive over the course of a weekend, and sometimes at night between weekdays. Accessing iDRAC was beyond what they wanted to do, so of course I had to do that. They had Dell support, but Dell had no "fix" for unstable machines other than to tell them to build a server room. Mind you - the ambient temperatures were always below 100º - any reasonable person would say that while that's not ideal for servers, "premium" servers should still be able to handle warm rooms, particularly when they're idle, and not crash or lock up. After that fiasco, they gradually replaced the Dells, one at a time, with machines I built. I wish they had tried harder to return the Dells, but they just wrote them off. I've learned that any savings in time and money (mostly - the Dells cost more than the machines I build, even accounting for extra billable time) aren't worth the loss in time, productivity and reliability in the long run. Of course, the opposite would be true if I just wanted more billable work, but I can't do that, unlike many others in the field. BTW - when I build a new generation of servers, I do months of testing, but the same general platform can last a good five years, like Ryzen 1000 through 5000 systems with ECC have lasted since 2017.