Refurbished workstations are insane deal for gaming on a budget
Best value dell refurbished workstation?
Help needed, want to buy refurbished DELL PRECISION 5540 for $890. Is that a good price?
Do Used/Refurbished Precision Workstations have a Windows license?
There are many videos and guides explaining how to turn an old office PC into an affordable gaming machine. But their cases are small, PSU weak, cooling sucks and forget about high amount of RAM... In my opinion a workstation solves most of those problems. I've bought used/refurbished Dell Precision T3600 for $180 - E5-1620 (4c/8t @ 3,60 GHz), 4 GB ECC RAM, 685W PSU. It's main advantages are:
CPU performance +/- just as good as highest end 3-4rd gen i7 AND can be upgraded to 6 or 8 core Xeon
Takes almost any GPU. From GT 710 to RTX 2080
ECC RAM is cheap as hell, 64 GB will cost you less than 16 GB non-ECC DDR4
Build quality and QoL stuff like hot swappable PSU or tool less installation
And it still costs less than a current gen Ryzen 5/i5 with an ok motherboard!
Do you need even more performance? There are dual CPU models like T5600 or HP Z620
Cheaper? Xeon X based workstations often cost less than $100