20 Xeon Silver 4114s for $20 and a Piece of Scrap Wood

September 2024. I was watching an eBay auction I had no business winning.

20 Intel Xeon Silver 4114 processors. Someone pulled them out of a decommissioned server, threw the whole lot up as a single listing, and I was the only one paying attention. I kept bidding. I kept winning rounds. When it finally ended I had 20 server CPUs headed to my door for $20 flat.

One dollar each. I still don’t fully understand what happened.

What These Actually Were

The Xeon Silver 4114 launched in 2017 as part of Intel’s Skylake-SP Xeon Scalable lineup. Same LGA 3647 socket as the W-3175X. 10 cores, 20 threads, 2.2 GHz base with a 3.0 GHz boost. These things were living in dual-socket servers at companies that paid real money for them.

At launch, a single 4114 retailed for around $694.

I have 20 of them.

That’s roughly $13,880 worth of server silicon that I bought for the price of a large pizza. At the time they were pulling these out of production and replacing them with something newer, so the whole lot was basically scrap value. I happened to be watching at the right time.

The Wall Art

Same story as the DDR2 wall art. I had 20 CPUs with nowhere to go and a piece of scrap wood sitting around.

20 Intel Xeon Silver 4114 LGA 3647 CPUs mounted in a wooden frame

Got the wood, laid out the grid, and mounted them with indoor wall tape — the kind that leaves zero residue on the chips if you ever pull them off. Four columns, five rows. Every one of them is a functional 10-core server CPU. The LGA 3647 package is big enough that they fill the frame properly — these aren’t small chips.

It looks insane on a wall. That was the goal.

Are They Useless?

Mostly, yeah. The 4114 is a 2017 server chip. The performance per watt is embarrassing by 2026 standards, and you’d need an actual LGA 3647 server board to run one — not exactly a casual purchase. Nobody’s building a gaming rig around a Xeon Silver.

But that’s kind of the point. These chips worked in real production infrastructure. They ran databases and VMs and whatever else enterprise IT was doing in 2017. Now they’re on my wall for a dollar each.

The IHS on every one of them has that worn-in look — thermal paste residue, little scratches from extraction. These things lived a life before they got here.

The Why

I genuinely cannot tell you why I bought 20 server CPUs at 17 years old with no server to put them in.

Same energy as the DDR2 RAM. eBay auction, low price, something told me to bid, I won, I figured it out later. The wall art was the “figured it out later” part.

If you’re watching the TikTok that brought you here — yeah, this is real. $20. Scrap wood. Wall tape. That’s the whole build.

20x Intel Xeon Silver 4114 — LGA 3647, 10C/20T, ~$694 each at launch. Bought September 2024 for $20 total. Mounted on scrap wood with wall tape. Currently hanging on a wall in Redlands.