Back in the mid-1990s, my personal home file server was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, the highest end 80386DX IBM offered: 25MHz, and a tiny bit of L1 cache on the motherboard. I ran NT Server 3.51 on it.

Yes, it worked. As a server, it was perfectly usable and rock solid. I used it for years and it never ever crashed.

But I never logged into the console. NT 3.x ran on a 386 but you would not want to use it as a desktop computer.