Last year, I purchased a refurbished Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Workstation. It was configured with 2 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148 processors with Hyperthreading, 256 GB of DDR4 RAM, a hard drive, an M.2 SSD NVMe drive, and an Nvidia Quadro P2000 with 5 GB of GDDR5 RAM. The cost was around $1,500.
I purchased this from PC Servers & Parts.
It’s been a year now and I have been doing lots of experiments with virtual machines. I installed Ubuntu Linux on this workstation to make use of KVM virtualization. I installed a variety of operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows on the VMs. Given the specifications of this workstation, I can run a good number of virtual machines.
It’s a good machine to practice your computing skills. For machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) work, you’ll probably need to get a more powerful graphics card or a special AI card. Anyway, it has at least a 1 kW power supply if I’m not mistaken.