Upgrading cheap/old computer

With used hardware, it very much depends on what the hardware is and what you’re using it for. if you can find something from the last 10 years it’s probably worth it, but I wouldn’t get anything older than that. Power usage is the main concern, as systems have been plenty powerful enough for most applications for sometime. Hardware reliability would be another factor.

When I was looking a couple of months ago, it looked like $200 USD was the sweet spot for used hardware, but at that price point, you could get one of those NUC knockoffs brand new, such as the Beelink N100. It just depends on what you need.

They're going to cost you that much in energy alone. Just get an AMD minipc and start from there. Maybe an N100 if you don't need the speed.

I bought such an old computer. 6th gen i3 Intel CPU, upgraded the memory to 16G and added more storage. For me, it works well.

However, I recommend checking the power usage of the system. Some older PCs might be very piwer hungry, which makes them expensive in the long run.

Edit: 6th gen and 7th gen Intel CPUs are not compatible with windows 11. The market is full of these old PCs and they are cheam. I personally would not buy anything older.

Some addition to my post: The computer I found is a Fujitsu Esprimo Q957. I've read online that they are very power efficient and don't draw as much. I will probably run some lightweight task almost 24/7 and sometimes heavier tasks for short periods of time. A raspberry pi is for me too expensive for the average specs, even if it is very efficient. I think a upgradable pc or mini pc is best, because they are cheap, but can be easily upgraded without buying a whole new computer.

OP, as others have said, power is a big issue.

I have two boxes at home, a 10 year old desktop, and a 4 year old SFF (small form factor). The SFF idles at about 12 watts, with 3 drives in it (2.5", RAID 5). The desktop idles at 120w with 2 drives in it. With more drives it idles at 200w.

I use the desktop as a duplicate of the SFF, but it only runs for 1 hour overnight for sync to occur (I also have cloud backup via storj.io).

The desktop ran with 2 drives for years, my electricity cost was about $1 per day. That pretty much doubles with the new multi drive setup (which is why it only runs once a day).

Power efficiency is a real concern, so paying for a newer computer is likely worth it. My long term plan is to build a new system periodically, both for power but also because hardware eventually dies.

You have to keep in mind that your server is going to be running 24/7/365 (hopefully). Depending on your electric rates, this can be a significant cost, and certainly will justify buying a newer, more efficient computer, over time.

RPi is popular because it is crazy efficient, only drawing a few watts from the wall.

Here's the deal. If your server is close to using up all its RAM, then yes, more RAM better.

However, if your server is close to being full on storage, you need to address that with a bigger storage drive.

You’d want to also consider, that desktop components were not created for 24/7 usage. My previous motherboard died by overheating south bridge – it likely wouldn’t happen in a desktop usage, but 24/7 didn’t let it cool ever. The chip has a small ‘volcano’ in the middle now.

I expect they will not be worth it as they're too underpowered for your specific use case. (I'm assuming your use case is hosting complex physical similations for a major university physics department and the old computer you're considering on Amazon is a used version of this one or something similar.)

For my home server I use whatever old PC I have laying around already.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

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