I am thinking about buying a home server for a wide range of things. I found some cheap old computers on amazon for around 80-90€. Is it worth it to upgrade them with another stick of ram or a larger SSD? 2 8gb RAM sticks are only around 15€, so that would be 100 in total. But my question is, is it worth it, or is the CPU the limiting factor. Some of them have one from the pentium series. Also, is 15€ for 2x8gb DDR4 RAM normal (not too cheap)? Maybe you have other ideas for a cheap home server. In my case I don’t think a 90€ raspberry pi is worth it
I expect they will not be worth it as they’re too underpowered for your specific use case. (I’m assuming your use case is hosting complex physical similations for a major university physics department and the old computer you’re considering on Amazon is a used version of this one or something similar.)
For my home server I use whatever old PC I have laying around already.