I see a LOT of people on Reddit asking if certain hardware is suitable for a basic first home server.
You can start a home server on almost anything.
My first home server was running on an Intel G3258 running Windows 7 with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD. IT worked perfectly for what I wanted, which was a basic seedbox (torrents), file server (for home photos etc) and Plex (media streaming).
Eventually I upgraded to a I5-3470 obtained from a PC given to me by a friend who had built a newer system. Found I could run the above and a basic game server such as Minecraft.
So for basic stuff, you do not need anything flash.
My current server is an i5-6500, 16GB RAM, 1x 512MB SSD for the OS (Windows 10), and 2x 4TB for data storage.
It runs all the above stuff along with a VM running some other services via RunTipi (Linux hosting environment)
It happily handles 4 users streaming 1080p videos from me, and a few people playing Minecraft.
So if you want a server and think that old 4th Gen i5 system is of no use, think again. You'll be surprised, and probably save a few bucks.