I don’t disagree with any of that. I usually prefer building my own when I’m the maintainer/builder. But not my current situation, a few things to note:

* I have (hopefully) one semester left. After that, I’m gone.

* A good portion of our experienced team will be gone within the next two years, including the few grad students who helped build our cluster. Introducing “non-supported” hardware would likely introduce problems for the next group.

* The prices above were from Dell, not self assembly shopping. University policies mandate any university funded tech/infrastructure equipment (especially desktops/servers) be done through specific partners. For us, that’s Dell, GovConnection, and CDW. I host my own 6 node Supermicro Microblade setup (render farm) from CDW that took almost a full year to purchase because nobody in the Purchasing Dept. for clubs was aware of that rule. Until my hopping from Boxx to Thinkmate to “haha, funny story...” uncovered it.