On eBay, it’s pretty common to see somewhat modern Dell workstations like the T5810 in full working condition sell for insanely low prices. In early November, I saw an auction on eBay for a working T5810 with only 3 bids, and the final price it sold for was $3.25 + $68 for shipping, and then yesterday I bought a T5820 for about $70 + $30 for shipping. Now these are for more of the entry level specs, mine has a Xeon W-2133, 16 GB of RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and an old Quadro card. It is entirely possible to spend over $8000 on one with an 18 core processor, and dual RTX A5000s, but the full cost of that is essentially just the GPUs and the CPU (which is about $1.5k). All of these listings for the cheap ones are also from eBay sellers that have been around for about 5 years or more and have good feedback, this isn’t the type of listing with the GPU scams where someone who joined eBay literally yesterday who has sold 0 items is “selling” and RTX 3060 Ti for $120.

Essentially these $100 ones have OK specs, but a ton of upgrading potential. The thing is that other computers that sell for this price and people buy with similar intent, start out with significantly worse specs, and can’t go nearly as high. Like the older SFF OptiPlex 7010s will also sell for $100, but they start with a 3rd or 4th gen i5, and obviously you can’t toss in half a TB of DDR4 memory and a 9th gen i9 or an 18 core Xeon like you can with the T5820.

I'd intended to pick up a Precision workstation for an R&D project, but I just realized that the line is ending. It seems like Pro Max is the intended replacement, but I see that they are classified as "desktops" instead of "workstations". Is there anything I should be keeping in mind when considering this transition? For example, I notice that the processor line is changed (from Xeon to Core Ultra), which changes things like available PCI-E lanes. When might this sort of thing matter?