I was running an old t410 with dual X5650s for ages. Super power hungy. I’ve recently moved to an older Dell Optiplex 7020 with an i5 4570, running 32 gb ram (not supported according to dell, but works fine). I’m running like 7 vms on proxmox and I haven’t seen any issues.

I just spun up a second 7020 as a proxmox backup server and my whole home lab power consumption went from around 130 watts to around 170 watts.

I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to speed around the city keeping its speed over 50 and if it’s speed dropped, it would explode. I think it was called “the bus that couldn’t slow down”