I have the immediate opportunity to get the following system for $75 due to a liquidation of company assets. My stepson needs a system better then what he has for gaming (we both plan on getting Age of Conan when it comes out). I don't have a lot of time to re-educate myself on hardware:
 
DELL PowerEdge 2600
Xeon 2.4 GhZ
1 gig RAM
5 x 33 gig HDD (RAID 5)
CD-ROM, etc.
No OS
 
Is it worth it? Logic says yes, but I wasn't sure

well that xeon alone would make a great buy at $75. Im guessing that's a Core 2 arch based Xeon, so it would definitely make a great gaming machine, you would just need another gig of ram and a graphics card.

I think the graphics card situation is what I am concerned about right at this moment. I'm still trying to determine what is available for PCI-X
 
• I/O slots: Seven expansion slots; 2 x 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X; 4 x 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X; 1 x 32-bit/33MHz PCI.
 
 

you need to check on PCI-E x16 cards, there are no graphics card for PCI-X, and even if there are, they are no good, especially for games. In my opinion to turn this into a gaming platform what you can do more than using the whole system is to salvage as many parts as you can and add the rest... Say get a $150-200 server board with a PCI-E x16 slot, a 8800GTS 320MB, and another gig of ram.
 
You also need to find out the socket of your CPU, Im almost positive it is LGA775.

My first thought is for $75 I would buy it to at least try and sell it on ebay.  The going rate for this type of server is much higher than $75.00.  And yes, the big problem would be the graphics the onboard 8MB ATI Rage will need to be upgraded and with only PCI-X or the single PCI slot so your choice of cards will not be pretty.  Also, lets not forget that the Ram in this thing should be old DDR - probably ECC DDR PC-2100.
My .02 is to buy it to resell it and put the profit towards a new rig.

hey man would you like to sell this dell poweredge for $100 just give me a call  i will give you cash if you are close if not ill send you a check or money order if you like. I have a dell poweredge 2600. this is a server only. not good for games. but it is a little tricky to get it to run. I am not out to rip people off i just need another server for parts for mine i would kindy give you more for it please.