GovDeals and FBMarketplace bargain hunt
My current/to be made homelab at 20 years old:
•A Newegg PC 32Gb DDR5, 4060 Ti, i7-13700F
1.5 TB SSD
•3 Elitedesk 800 G5 SFF, 16 Gb DDR4, i7-9700
•1 Elitedesk 800 G4 SFF, 32Gb DDR4, i7-8700, RTX 3050 Low Profile, 1TB HDD, 256 GB SSD
•2 The Cisco Catalyst 2960X-48TS-L with Lifetime lanbase License
•1 Dell Optiplex 5070 Micro 16 Gb DDR4, i5-9500, 1 TB SSD
•Raspberry Pi 5 4Gb
•PS5
•APC UPS 1500 Pro Battery backup
In these trying times, I try my best to find computers deals, and being in the south, it’s extremely daunting to find places who will sell you things for a steal. So here's how I’ve found perfect deals in a small town, surrounded by small towns; and its costs.
For the Elitedesk 800 G5 SFF, The 2x Cisco Catalyst 2960X-48TS-L, I found these through a GovDeals auction, despite me not showing up to actually see the condition of the lot, everything was in excellent conditon (despite dust.) Included in the deal was about 14 ,48 port switches, most but being 10/100, except for 2, so the rest not being very useful. It also Included various Elitedesk 800 SFF’s (10 G4 SFF, 10 G3 SFF, and 3 G5 SFF). Half of the 23 SFF included 16Gb of DDR4, and their i7 CPU’s. And there was some other Miscellaneous Cisco items. Everything in the lot was for a mere $700 dollars. (the entire lot was valued to be $6,000+)
For the Newegg PC, I was on facebook marketplace, as someone was selling their sons computer to finance a car. The PC had dust bunnies and definitely was smoked around a lot, but I paid a measly $600 bucks for it. Cleaned it up, and I sold my old XPS Pre-built PC for $800 bucks and actually made a profit from getting the upgraded prebuilt.
The Raspberry Pi 5, was on a ebay auction, just right before RAMmageddon hit, and was sold for 30 bucks.
For the Optiplex 5070 Micro, a guy who bought a office setup from Bestbuy, never used it, and sold it to me for $200 bucks, including a Wifi6 dongle, and a HDMI Dock as well with 2 HP monitors, I easily sold the accessories for $220 bucks for a profit, and kept the Micro PC.
The APC battery was during the massive US winter storm, and got it for $30, and a $30 replacement battery.
And of course the PS5 was a gift.
So far as 2026, I’ve just recently started my homelab. With everything going on in the world today, I found a need to keep myself busy. I have a roadmap planned out, I am not learning to become a IT, Cybersecurity, or other networking jobs, I want to do this for fun, and myself. I have all the cables I will need to finish this, and I am currently doing so, so please mind, but don’t mind; the terrible cable management. Hoping this helps people find, or inspires them to go out looking for their deals in these trying times.