[everfrustrated]

Generally large companies will have an existing vendor that they use to dispose their IT equipment through. They will shred parts like storage devices and anything that can reasonably be resold will be sold through various auction houses.

Sticks of ram will certainly be resold, custom aws motherboards - not so much.

I have seen custom (unpublished) intel cpu parts on ebay before which are almost certainly aws's custom ones.

Almost nothing will get used by consumers - enterprise server gear is designed for heat/air speed/noise/energy cost requirements which are incompatible with consumer requirements. It's recycled only in the sense that a smaller business might be interested in it because at the end of its economic life its now cheap to buy (but not cheap to run).

https://cloudninjas.com/

https://savemyserver.com/

https://unixsurplus.com/

[rekabis]

I broadly agree with you in regards to server-class equipment as a whole.

Simply put, your average gamer isn’t going to snag a 16-unit rackmount blade server to game with. Not only is it supidly inappropriate for home use, but it is also wildly out-of-spec with what gaming requires.

However, normal rackmount servers - especially 3U+ units that have a decent number of PCIe slots - can be extracted from rackmount cases and put into eATX cases that can better serve them on a desktop. It’s what I have done before, to great effect. With the right heatsinks and case fans, it can end up being a moderately quiet system. Loud for a consumer system, sure, but nothing like the “Boeing Dreamliner at full takeoff power” that an actual server setup would generate for sound.