Lenovo D30 evilstation
While scrolling Facebook marketplace I came across this fugly "little" machine for only $100. At the time it came with a pretty underpowered xeon (I think e5 2650 can't remember) & 64 gb of ecc ddr3. It has dual cpu and x16 pcie lanes which i plan to use in the future for toying around with vms
Even with the ancient mobo chipset I saw some potential. Picked up a Xeon 1650 for around $30 on ebay, found a massive 135 twp aliexpress cooler as the previous cooler was nowhere near good enough. I was kinda surprised a server chip like this required so much cooling.
Found another good deal on a evga 1080ti black edition which im not too sure (please correct me if I am wrong) is the most powerful gpu for this architecture
Overall I'm only around $300 in this build and I have many more plans with it. When I acquire the necessary funds I plan to buy more storage to attempt Dual booting linux. I am very aware that windows is most likely choking the performance but I've been hesitant to switch for compatibility reasons.
Im open to hear any feedback or recommendations!