LGA 2011, DDR3, Easystore shucks or data center decomms (8x3TB was $200).

I got 48 vCPUs and 96GB DDR3 for <$300 in 2016 off eBay. It isn't the most powerful, but it was cheap.

vCPUs is very different than dedicated cores. My 8 core machine could have 48 vCPUs as well, it doesn't say anything.

Not OP, but I have an R620 running in my garage I use for self hosting. It has 12 cores (Intel Xeon E5-2665), 96GB of RAM, 10x2.5" drive bays (came empty). The SSDs I use I shuck out of old external USB drives.

Together with a full standing rack on wheels, I bought them for $600 cash (plus U-Haul rental to get it home).

My trick is craigslist in a city with datacenters (PHX). There are resellers here who buy used hardware from local datacenters and resell them to smaller businesses. I've had it running 24x7 for almost 3 years now and it is still going strong.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ has some good references for acquiring hardware for a home lab setup.

That makes sense. 2 x 6 core Xeons were cheap even back in the day. And it came without storage. Again, as someone who actually buys straight off FB and Google when they dispose servers (as the companies who you buy from off eBay), I'd really like to know where he got that specific 64 core (which would be a quad socket if it's older than 2015) 192 GB 24 TB server because I'd like to order more than a few. Your server is not even worth 1/20th of what his is worth.

The closest I can get a disposed server with those specs is at least 8k

Not ideal but you can go for used rack mounted servers. You can easily get even better specs for less than 2k with reasonably recent CPUs too (E5-xxxxv3 and up).

At least that was the case when I set up my home server rack ~2 years ago. (Though 24TB might be too much since server grade SAS storage is very expensive even when it's used. So what I did was to buy servers with as little storage as possible and then just put SATA HDDs that I can get for dirt cheap.)

Refurbished Supermiro from The Server Store, there were plenty 2 years ago when I bought it - market has probably changed since then.

Same, that's going to be like 4x that price refurbished around the best case...

Ebay I would guess. Requires a bit of luck though