Tired of my dual Xeon PowerEdge sucking 300 watts 24/7 and murdering my power bill. What's some good NON-enterprise hardware that can handle ESXi 8 reliably? I am kind of thinking of maybe a 12th gen i7/i9 Optiplex and slapping a quad port Intel NIC in it. Does this sound good? Will ESXi complain about anything here? I tried it once on a 10th gen i7 Optiplex and it seemed happy, but I need something a little beefier than that. The one thing that concerns me is the newer Intel desktop chips and e-cores. I'm not sure how well ESXi will handle these, or if it knows how to properly handle scheduling with them. Any better suggestions? I also wonder how much I can drop the power load by just removing the second CPU, but I suspect it will still use considerably more than something like an Optiplex. I'll miss having 512 GB RAM, a boat load of cores, and redundant everything, but I need to be more practical. The rack server is just so expensive to run.…