Comment by trollbridge
1 day ago
We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in they’re getting rid of, along with hardware we’re throwing out that we don’t need anymore.
It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for any task: they use way too much power, have a large form factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need extra power cables, lack driver support on modern operating systems, and in return for all that don’t have as much power as something much better you could get for $100.
Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for people with a retro computing hobby or people removing semiconductor components for other purposes.
An obsolete data centre isn’t worth much either. (We have a small one made from equipment being liquidated from local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power consumption is too high and it is not set up for efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw workloads.
The key is to calculate right and go for the mainstream hardware. If you are a hosting company with diversified use cases, you have plenty of room to downcycle hardware until it breaks. If you are operating under limited space in a field with bleeding edge/performance targets, doing this is not viable. There are many solution provides that will buy your outdated things. I‘m not saying that old hardware is great or a cash cow in general, but the lifetime can usually be doubled or tripled if the right use case can be found and when you are the owner.
Side quest: Virtualized instances at cloud providers never get upgraded unless recreated. I bet there are millions of VMs running for years on specs and prices of 2018-2020.