I updated my decade-old hands-off remote HP DL160 westmere-era system to a modest ryzen 5600 one earlier this year. It was cheap, had a massive power consumption reduction, and was astonishingly faster. Yes, a desktop grade cpu in a budget server board (with decent IPMI/remote management, Asrock Rack x570d4u). But it was totally worth it.

It has never had a screen, keyboard, or media plugged in. It was remote installed literally by booting off a virtual DVD image from the freebsd.org https server over the internet. Mostly to prove to myself that the remote control was complete. Not that I particularly recommend it but I wanted to know for sure what the worst case was if I had to have somebody swap a board for me. It was actually easy.

I was tempted to get a used server via ebay, but this way I know its new hardware and should be good for 5-10 years before hardware age becomes an issue.

Also... compiling 4+ versions of llvm as well as gcc, rust and node all together is quite a stress test. Yay our ports system.