For a desktop, yeah, you’re generally better off buying newer from a performance/$ standpoint. For servers, the calculus can shift a bit depending on your company’s size and workloads. Most smaller companies (small is relative, but let’s go with “monthly cloud bill is < $1MM”) could run on surprisingly old hardware and not care.

I have three Dell R620s, which are over a decade old. They have distributed storage via Ceph on NVMe over Mellanox ConnectX3-PRO. I’ve run DB benchmarks (with realistic schema and queries, not synthetic), and they nearly always outclass similarly-sized RDS and Aurora instances, despite the latter having multiple generations of hardware advancements. Local NVMe over Infiniband means near-zero latency.

Similarly, between the three of them, I have 384 GiB of RAM, and 36C/72T. Both of those could go significantly higher.

Those three, plus various networking gear, plus two Supermicro servers stuffed with spinning disks pulls down around 700W on average under mild load. Even if I loaded the compute up, I sincerely doubt I’d hit 1 kW. Even then, it doesn’t really matter for a business, because you’re going to colo them, and you’re generally granted a flat power budget per U.

The downside of course is that you need someone[s] on staff that knows how to provision and maintain servers, but it’s honestly not that hard to learn.

[0]: https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review...

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-r...