Had some consluting customers who needed a Pentium 4 era server to run trivial office DB stuff (in a custom spendy niche market application); they took my specs and went to ebay and got a cheap <i>used</i> IBM 1U rack system. This lived under the desk of one of the 3 people in a 16ft x 24ft office.<p>It sounded like a banshee because the fans were all losing bearings and the RPM wobbled. Unfortunately they were stuck with it because the software license was tied to a specific install and that was 15x the cost of hardware I'd quoted them.<p>They'd saved i dunno, $2k or so? buying "cheap" hardware. I heard they'd bought a $1k "sound proof" rack to house it in just before they folded up a year later. Apparently that wasn't anything near the worst business decision they'd made.