Dell — service tag
The seven-character tag on the pull-out label at the front, or on a sticker at the rear. Enter it on Dell’s support site and you get the original shipped configuration — processors, memory, drives, PSUs.
The honest answer: the model name on the front cannot tell you. Two identical-looking R740s can be worth a multiple of each other. Here is how to find out what you actually have — and what moves the number once you do.
The biggest single factor
Model number, not core count alone
Often worth more than the chassis
Counted separately, always
Two beats one beats none
Small parts, real money
A Dell PowerEdge R740 is a chassis. What it is worth depends on what someone put in it, and that varies more than most sellers expect.
Take two R740s out of the same rack, bought in the same year.
The first has two mid-range Silver processors, eight 16GB DIMMs, no drives, one power supply and no rails — because someone stripped it for spares before it came out.
The second has two high-core Gold processors, twenty-four 32GB DIMMs, eight populated drive bays, dual power supplies, its rail kit and its bezel.
Same model. Same year. Same photograph. The second is worth a large multiple of the first, and most of that difference is memory and drives rather than the chassis they sit in.
This is why we do not publish a price list, and why you should be sceptical of anyone who does. A list organised by model name cannot see inside the box.
You need this whoever you sell to, so it is worth two minutes. Pick whichever route you already have access to.
The seven-character tag on the pull-out label at the front, or on a sticker at the rear. Enter it on Dell’s support site and you get the original shipped configuration — processors, memory, drives, PSUs.
If the box is still racked and reachable: iDRAC → System → Inventory. Or from the OS, racadm hwinventory dumps the lot.
iLO → Information → System Information gives processors, memory and drive bays. The serial on the front pull-tab gets you the original build sheet from HPE.
lscpu for processors, dmidecode -t memory for the DIMM population, lsblk for drives, lspci for accelerators.
Get-CimInstance Win32_Processor and Win32_PhysicalMemory cover the two that matter most.
Genuinely. A clear photo of the service tag or the pull-out label, plus one of the front of the chassis, is enough for us to work from. Do not let this step stop you.
Roughly in the order they matter. The first is the one most people guess right; the middle three are the ones most people miss.
A 15th-generation chassis is worth a multiple of a 13th-generation one with the same badge on the front. If you only establish one thing, establish this.
Not "two Xeons" — the actual SKU. A Gold 6248R and a Silver 4210 are both Xeons and are not close on value.
The one most sellers underestimate. Populated memory is frequently worth more than the chassis around it, particularly at 32GB and 64GB per module.
Counted and priced separately from the server, always. Whether they go with it is a commercial decision you make, not a technical one.
Dual fitted prices above a single, and well above a chassis shipped with none. They are also awkward to source separately, which is why they carry value.
Individually trivial, collectively not. Across forty servers the rail kits alone are a line worth having on the offer.
None of these are obvious, and all of them are decided before anyone quotes you.
Pulling the memory and drives to "sell them separately" almost always nets less, because you have turned one complete server into an empty chassis plus a bag of parts. Ask before you strip.
Forty identical nodes out of one refresh price better per unit than forty mixed ones. Selling ten now and thirty later usually gets you a worse number on both.
Rails, caddies, bezels, cable-management arms and power cords. They get binned during a decommission because they look like packaging. They are not.
Hardware depreciates on a curve that steepens. A server sitting on a pallet in a storeroom for eight months is worth measurably less than the same server the week it came out of the rack.
Build the list below with whatever you have established — a rough guess is fine, and you can correct it later. You will get a written offer broken out per unit, within one business day.
There is no minimum, no obligation to sell, and we pay the shipping either way.
Nobody can tell you from the model name alone, and anyone who quotes you a figure off a model name is guessing. Two R740s can differ by a multiple depending on the processors, the memory fitted and what is in the drive bays. Work out the configuration using the steps above, send it to us, and you will have a written per-unit number within one business day.
Some sites do, and the figures are wrong for most readers — which is worse than no figure at all, because you make a decision on it. The variables that move a server's value are all inside the chassis, and a list organised by model name cannot see them.
Usually yes, and more than people expect once the memory and drives are counted. Where it genuinely is not, we will tell you that plainly rather than wasting your time — and we will still say so in writing.
More than almost anyone expects. Rail kits, bezels and empty drive caddies are cheap individually and add up quickly across a batch. They are also the things most often thrown away during a decommission.
That is fine — there is no minimum here. Larger matched batches attract better per-unit pricing, but a single box gets the same written offer and the same prepaid shipping.
No. We buy hardware that was working when it came out of service, because we sell it on to be used again.
Send us a photo of the service tag. We will work out the configuration and come back with a written per-unit offer.
Get an offer →