Homelab

You are seeing on eBay CPUs that WERE worth four thousand dollars, now their only use is either scrap or homelab/homeserver usage.

As someone already mentioned numerous times, it's orders of magnitude more likely that motherboards fail instead of the CPUs: case in point a ESXi server at work that sent some DIMMs belly up because of a faulty motherboard, I somewhat forced the field support technician to not even bother trying the same motherboard with a different CPU (they later tried the same motherboard in their labs with a brand new CPU and the issue stayed the same).

Depending on your workload or activity, even going with refurbished or repurposed chipsets might be the way, as is exactly what a lot of manufacturers on sites such as AliExpress are doing, can save you quite a lot of money and still obtain an acceptable result.

I noticed you asked me in the previous post for some inputs, feel free to ask away either here or via DM, up to you :)

I have bought used components off ebay for my home lab. It works just fine. The only thing I usually buy "new" are PSUs and Hard Drives.

Yep, they are real and they are useful. When data centers upgrade they flood the market with older tech which keeps the price of old xeons pretty low. Data centers care about performance per watt more than anything else and old processors are inefficient. Running one old CPU in your house wont make much of a difference to your power bill, but at datacenter scales that adds up to thousands upon thousands of watts.

Retailed for $4k in 2010 doesn't mean it's worth that now. The ebay price reflects the reality of product lifecycles.

Don't forget that a single core on a modern CPU might be 4x faster and use 4x less power than an old xeon. Old server gear is cheap because it's slow and costs heaps to run - make sure to budget for ongoing costs too.

I reduced my servers power consumption from $5 a day to $1 by replacing 2 2667v2 machines with a single i5 12500 machine... And it's significantly faster. My servers main use was Plex and at $150~ a month to run it was cheaper to be subscribed to Netflix, Disney, Stan, binge etc every month vs leaving the old gear on.