What is my server worth?

Every buyer in this trade answers this question with "send us a list and we'll tell you". We do that too — it is the only way to give you a real figure. But it is a frustrating answer if all you want is a rough sense of whether the eight boxes in your rack are worth bothering with.

So here is the part nobody writes down: what actually moves the price, roughly in order of how much it matters.

1. Generation, above everything else

This is the big one, and it is not close. A server two generations newer than another can be worth many times as much, even with a similar-sounding specification. The secondary market prices on what people still want to run in production, and demand falls away sharply as platforms age out of vendor support.

If you know nothing else about your kit, find out what generation it is. That single fact tells you more than everything else combined.

2. The processors fitted

Two identical chassis of the same generation can differ by several hundred pounds on the CPUs alone. Core count and clock speed both matter, and the gap between an entry-level part and a high-core-count one in the same family is wide.

A common and expensive mistake is pulling the CPUs to sell separately, then offering the chassis as a bare unit. Unless you have a specific buyer for the processors, you will usually do better leaving them in — a complete, working machine sells for more than the sum of its parts, because somebody can rack it and use it.

More on what the processors are worth →

3. Memory fitted

Leave the RAM in. In a well-populated machine the memory is frequently worth more than the chassis around it, and stripping it before valuation almost always loses you money.

What matters is the total capacity, the module size it is made up of, and the generation — DDR4 and DDR5 are not interchangeable and are not priced alike. Twenty-four 32 GB modules is a different proposition to twelve 64 GB ones, even though both come to 768 GB.

4. Drives, and whether they're staying in

This is a commercial decision you get to make, and it changes the figure either way.

• Drives included — we price them in as part of the unit. Capacity, interface (SAS, SATA or NVMe) and whether they are enterprise-grade all matter.
• Drives removed — we price the server without them. Tell us when you send the list so the valuation reflects it.

One thing worth knowing either way: keep the caddies. Empty drive caddies have a real value of their own, and a chassis arriving with empty bays and no caddies is worth noticeably less than the same chassis with them. If you are pulling the drives, pull them out of the caddies and send the caddies with the machine.

5. PSUs, rails and the small stuff

Easy to overlook, and collectively they add up:

• Power supplies — dual fitted is worth more than a single, and far more than none. A server that cannot be powered on at the far end is a much harder sell.
• Rail kits — genuinely valuable, and frequently left screwed into the rack when the machine comes out. Worth ten minutes to retrieve.
• Bezels, cable management arms, riser cards, RAID and HBA controllers — all priced, all easily lost during a decommission.

6. Quantity and consistency

A matched batch out of one refresh prices better per unit than the same number of mixed odds and ends. Twenty identical machines with the same configuration are straightforward to test, list and resell; twenty different ones are twenty separate jobs. That difference shows up in what we can offer.

That said, we buy single units too. One box out of a cupboard is a perfectly normal enquiry.

What we do not price on

We also do not buy kit that is faulty, dead or untested — we buy hardware that was working when it came out of service, because we sell it on to be used again.

So why is there no price list on this site?

Because it would be wrong for most people who read it. Two servers of the same model can differ by a factor of several depending on the six things above. Any figure we published would be either so hedged as to be useless, or misleading for the majority of visitors.

We would rather look at your actual list and give you a real number for your actual hardware. That takes us a few minutes and it costs you nothing.

The long version: why two identical servers are worth different money →

Getting a real figure

Send us what you have — make, model and quantity is enough to start. If you are not sure of the exact models, a photo of the asset tags or a service tag list works just as well, and if you have an asset export from your CMDB you can simply attach it.

We come back with a written valuation, priced per unit so you can see exactly what each line is worth before you decide anything. Collection anywhere in the UK is free and insured, and payment is by bank transfer once the kit is checked in against the list. There is no obligation to sell.

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