alt Hacker News1-3rd gen Epycs can be had super cheap, but the motherboards are expensive.
Also not worth getting anything less than 3rd gen unless you're primarily buying them for the pcie lanes and ram capacity - a regular current gen consumer CPU with half - a quarter of the core count will outperform them in compute while consuming significantly less power.
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The reason for this is that CPU upgrades on the same board were/are very viable on SP3.
Doing that on Intel platforms just wasn't done for basically ever, it was never worth it. But upgrade to Milan from Naples or Rome is very appealing.
So SP3 CPUs are much more common used than the boards, simply because more of them were made. This is probably very bad for hobbyists, the boards are not going to get cheap until the entire platform is obsolete.
Lots of great second hand hardware to be had on ebay. Even last gen used CPUs, as well as RAM, at much less than retail.
However when you end up building a server quite often the motherboard + case is the cheap stuff, the CPUs are second in cost and the biggest expense can be the RAM.
When buying used Epycs you have to contend with them possibly being vendor-locked to a specific brand of motherboard as well.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-psb-vendor-locks-epyc-cpus-...