My homeserver is essentially a top of line gaming PC from 2012 with a Quadro RTX 4000 from 2018. It was not top of the line in 2013 when I bought everything on sale but after many inexpensive ebay upgrades, it's now what I wish I could have afforded back then. Most of the time, it's perfectly fine since it's main job is jellyfin. I'm sure I could be saving some electricity with newer hardware but with the current market, it's just not worth it. I'm missing AVX2 support which Claude Code has recently made a requirement but now I just have Claude ssh into it from another PC that is a few years newer.

I've been extremely pleased with my R320 in a NAS role. Idles at 40 watts, is quiet, has ECC, and the drives stay cool.

Maybe that's still too much power for some people, but I'm happy with the tradeoffs.