Off lease workstations?

[mjstonehome]

Does anyone here have experience with buying "Refurbished" off lease workstations for audio work?

A friend of mine who does IT for a medium-large institution clued me in that there are pallets of these few-year old workstations from major brands like HP etc. that places like where he works let go of on a semi-regular basis. They end up available on the used market through these bulk resellers and some of them anyway have what in my mind seem to be quite decent specs for an audio machine even if the hardware isn't bleeding edge anymore. (Mainly looking for high track/plugin count mixing power, not so much audio recording or live midi performance.)

But my friend has never personally bought one after the refurbishment process, and isn't a musician himself so I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone has experience with doing this, or maybe some other pros/cons I haven't yet thought of.
Thanks!

[BONES]

I've bought several ex-lease laptops over the years and they have always been excellent. I recently bought a Surface Pro 4, ex-lease, for less than US$400 and it's got Core i7 (6th Gen), 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It looks like it just sat on someone's desk for a couple of years and I reckon they used a desktop keyboard because the TypeCover didn't look like it had ever been used at all. It's more than powerful enough to do all our backing on stage. My previous Surface was also ex-lease and it's still going great guns, 3 years after I bought it (2013 model). If I hadn't filled it's 128GB SSD, I wouldn't have bought the new one.

[jdnz]

if they're proper desktop workstations (so HP Z line, Dell Precision line) you should be good - they're built extremely solidly, we've got some 2013 era Z's still in operation. Only issue we ever seem to have is the PSU fans get noisy (be warned - Dell and HP love non-standard PSUs, so don't expect to just chuck in an aftermarket PSU as a fix or as a way to get more wattage for a big GPU).

If he really means the Dell/HP business line desktops (optiplex/elitedesk) - they're definitely built a bit cheaper, especially in terms of power budgets (forget big GPUs) but still very solid - we've got huge numbers of them in use and failure rate is tiny (and we have some of them going back to about 2014)

[mjstonehome]

Thanks for all this info!
I don't think I'd be looking for any superpowered gpu upgrades (even if they were available lol.)
Probably would just chuck a nice SSD in it and get to work