Thanks for this! I guess that settles my case deliberation at least. But man, getting all the things you mentioned for $170 on eBay is crazy good!!! I must just really need to dig in there a bit deeper (it’s gonna be too easy to go broke with home networking as a hobby otherwise lol). I guess so long as I am memtesting my RAM and burning in drives right after getting them I should be okay. I think I also am overindexing on trying to get my power draw as low as possible instead of really doing the math out and seeing how long I’d need to be running something 24/7 before the power savings ends up outweighing the price differential. But thanks again!

Thank you! The case rec is super helpful actually, I was considering the Fractal Design Define R5 (though I wasn’t sure how to feel about potentially spending the same amount on my motherboard as my case, but people seem to swear by it), so it’s great to have confirmation they’re actually worth it. I had given PC Part Picker a shot, but it seems like it doesn’t quite catch the ECC memory support for some of the AMD systems (maybe because they’re unofficial?) I will give it another shot though, and thanks again!

Thanks for this! The jet engine sound level and higher power draw were both what made me a little wary of used enterprise stuff (plus jumping from never having a home server straight to rack mounted felt like flying a little too close to the sun). And thanks also for the epyc rec; based on other comments it sounds like maybe pairing that with dual 3090s is the most cost effective option (especially because I fear you’re right on prices not being adjusted downward; not sure if the big hit Nvidia took this morning because of DeepSeek might change things but I suppose that ultimately unless underlying demand drops, why would they drop their prices?) Thanks again for taking the time to respond!