HN Explorer

Low Cost Mini PCs (lowcostminipcs.com)

701 points by mjcurl ↗ HN
While searching for mini PCs for my home server, I figured I'd use the eBay API to find the cheapest ones. Inspired by diskprices.com, I built a static site using Eleventy and a python script that uses regex to parse the data. I tried to include as many filters as possible like OS, Wifi, HDMI etc.

I would like to add power usage, noise levels, PCIe slots but that data is hard to find.

Please let me know if you have any feedback / suggestions.

Thanks!

343 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 359 ms ] thread
mjcurl
The coolest ones I found:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/315406551868 https://www.ebay.com/itm/386903851995

I one I ended up getting: https://www.ebay.com/itm/296370169192?var=594356150752

samstave
That one you got is stunning value!

This site is fantastic.

Also - look at CyberPunk 2077 Crawler

https://github.com/itsOwen/CyberScraper-2077

By another HNer.

This site is great!.

Would be cool to use it as a template for any other category of "thing" -- if you could share it.

xhrpost
Stunning value indeed, they got more RAM than my M3 I use for work. Edit: oh wait there are drop downs to change the specs, subject is max specs but initial price is the min specs. Still good though
lastofthemojito
It's a shame that people need to use this template to design these sorts of eBay search sites though. Seems like it'd be easy enough for eBay to create a tabular view where one could choose fields applicable to their search - the same table that works for mini PCs could work for smartphones or comic books or collectable coins or whatever.

I suspect that doing so wouldn't be great for eBay's business though - the table is sortable, but eBay wants to sell promoted listings that are at the top of pages. And less dense search result views with big photos probably entice people to buy "shiny" things rather than specs.

dotBen
That one you got is stunning value!

(it was priced for a more basic spec than in the title. If you played with the configuration the spec in the title came to $219.99. You can make your own determination whether that was as good value)

roshansingh
The one you got is so cool. Can you leave this running 24x7 and is it noisy?
drcongo
A CPU arch filter would be useful (I've been on the lookout for an ARM based one), as would the ability to choose a different eBay region (I'm in the UK). Nice work though!
kyriakos
This is fantastic. Can you add a filter for location US/Europe/Asia?
rkachowski
seconded, i've been looking for exactly this kind of machine in EU and this would be ideal.
mjcurl
Yes, should be easy. Would it work if it used the region's ebay marketplace to get results? The following could be added:

  EBAY_AT - Austria (ebay.at)
  EBAY_AU - Australia (ebay.com.au)
  EBAY_BE - Belgium (ebay.com.be)
  EBAY_CA - Canada (ebay.ca)
  EBAY_CH - Switzerland (ebay.ch)
  EBAY_DE - Germany (ebay.de)
  EBAY_ES - Spain (ebay.es)
  EBAY_FR - France (ebay.fr)
  EBAY_GB - Great Britain (ebay.co.uk)
  EBAY_HK - Hong Kong (ebay.com.hk)
  EBAY_IE - Ireland (ebay.ie)
  EBAY_IT - Italy (ebay.it)
  EBAY_NL - Netherlands (ebay.nl)
  EBAY_PL - Poland (ebay.pl)
  EBAY_SG - Singapore (ebay.sg)
exacube
yes that'd be great!

and if the price could somehow include the shipping rate to the country, that'd be awesome

inhumantsar
region can help but Item Location is the important one
prmoustache
ideally you would add regional popular second hand websites too.

I don't know about the USA but in most europe countries ebay is less and less the default place to look for second hand items.

transpute
What are some alternative EU sites?
kyriakos
I don't think there's an EU-wide site for used items unfortunately. Each country has a couple of local sites.
prmoustache
leboncoin.fr in France, subito.it I believe in Italy, in Spain Wallapop.es although wallapop also exist in some of those euro countries, anibis.ch in Switzerland, I am not sure about the rest and I guess they don't have a public api so you would probably have to rely on web scrapping.
aarroyoc
+1 for Wallapop in Spain. There's also MilAnuncios, but Wallapop is what people say when they say they want to sell second-hand stuff
JoachimSchipper
marktplaats.nl is the big "eBay-like" for the Netherlands.
Tepix
kleinanzeigen.de for Germany
CRConrad
blocket.se, tori.fi, huuto.net or huutokauppa.fi. I think.
beeboobaa3
ebay isn't widely used in the EU. Sure the sites exist, but they're just filled with ads, not by listings put up by consumers.

You'd need to support national alternatives, like marktplaats for NL

Tepix
It is still widely used in Germany.
Daneel_
Yes please, this would be very helpful (I’m in Australia).
JohnHammersley
As others have said, a filter on item location would be ideal, but the region might also work. Specifically UK/GB for my use case :)

Thanks for putting the site together!

Tepix
Perfect, please do add these!
prmoustache
I seconds that, without filters it is worthy of ending up on r/usdefaultism
nolok
Another approach for this if you're in europe (I do not know the market elsewhere) are the quality refurbished resellers (they buy bulk from companies upgrading, refurbish, sell with warranty).

Eg in France https://www.afbshop.fr/PC-Bureau or https://www.tradediscount.com/ordinateur-bureau/unite-centra...

Price might be a bit higher, but eg right now for sub 200 you can get a mini pc with ryzen 2400G and 16GB of RAM, with warranty. That's a great proxmox machine for jellyfin & co.

transpute
Useful index!

Suggestions:

  1. encode search filters in URL, for sharing/bookmark
  2. Add "Intel vPro" as a filter.
mjcurl
Good call, I'll encode the state in the URL.

Did not come across a lot of Intel VPros in my searches. What's the use case for them?

transpute
Many of the Dell/HP mini PCs with Intel i5 or higher are vPro, because they were used in corporate environments, but it looks like this is rarely part of the eBay item description. Thanks for checking.

vPro devices support Intel TXT (DRTM) to verify firmware integrity on each boot, based on user/OS policy. TXT can be used with QubesOS ("Anti Evil Maid"), Windows Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) or upcoming Linux Secure Launch in mainline Linux. vPro also supports optional remote KVM/serial management over LAN with Intel AMT, which could be considered a feature or anti-feature, depending on use case.

mjcurl
Thanks for the info! Listings often fail to mention many things, and aren't standardized, so it's quite a mess.
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mdrzn
Add a location filter otherwise it's completely useless from outside USA. I clicked on a $30 Ebay link and the shipping price is US $542.06 UPS Worldwide Saver
mjcurl
True, thought of this as a test run. Other locations should be added soon.
gboone
Would be nice if links opened a new tab. Good job.
mjcurl
Thanks! I think it's a better practice to not open links in a new tab i.e users should have control over their experience. But it can be subjective.
achow
Opening in a new tab has become some kind of standard UX. Regardless of that, for this kind of site it would be very useful for product spec comparison.
Scoundreller
I’m a Ctrl-click kinda guy for these scenarios.
samstave
Always open in new tab. Ill keep track of the 437 I have open in 7 different FF windows, and the couple Edge tabs to hide cookies ThankYouVeryMuch

EDIT: Yes ctrl-click is too much effort. Middle-click even.

(Many forget a middle click on a mouse-wheel is also a ctrl-click/new-tab button, and the thumb button MOUSE4 is back)

josefresco
Think about it this way: Will the user "lose their place" on your page if they click a link and go back? Will the user lose any filtering or search options? If the answer is yes to either, open in a new tab. I personally make this determination all the time, especially on social media after I've scrolled a lot and don't want my "progress" to be lost.
mjcurl
That makes sense to me, thank you. I have changed links to open in a new tab.
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nfriedly
I think not forcing links to open in a new tab is the right call.

However, the point about losing one's place is a valid one, and I agree with the other commenter that said it would be good to encode the state in the URL to solve that.

shmoogy
Being able to filter by CPU (and model i.e. optiplex 3010 or whatever) would be useful here. I'm looking for a sff that has 13th gen intel cpu, supports 64gb ram as an example.
mjcurl
Since there's hundreds/thousands of cpus and models, how about a keyword filter field?
roger_
Came to suggest the same thing.

I’d love to be able to filter by CPU and generation.

Maybe using an LLM could help with the parsing?

voidUpdate
oooo, this is useful! It's a pain trying to search for these kinds of things manually, and it would be nice to get a whole stack of the kind of lenovo I have haha. Just need the UK region support :P
mjcurl
UK marketplace has been added :)
jasongill
Would it be possible to add a column with some kind of CPU score - for those of us who don't keep up on PC CPU advancements, it's hard to tell if an i3 5th gen is faster or slower than an i5 3rd gen
mjcurl
I did plan this, but upon getting the data, found it too difficult for the initial version. There's no standard for CPU (or most fields actually), so sellers write it in a variety of ways. But it could be done, after I compile a dataset of cpu > benchmarks.
nfriedly
I like passmark / cpubenchmark.net to get a good ballpark idea of CPU performance, because it covers a wide range of CPUs, and because it has both single-core and multi-core scores.
mjcurl
I prefer that too. Now to get data for all the listed CPUs!
outime
This is neat, although I have a word of caution (even if it might be a bit obvious): it's possible to find good deals, but you should be aware of power usage. There are modern mini PCs, such as those with Intel N100 processors, that are very cheap and consume very few watts while being useful for many purposes. I personally bought a brand-new CHUWI LarkBox X, and it's been great. It cost around 100 EUR on a deal. If however power usage isn't an issue for you and you don't care about other misc stuff (noise levels etc) then you can disregard this.
mjcurl
Agreed, an N100 mini PC can be a great deal. They also tend to be smaller. I added a separate Intel filter that includes a lot of N100s. But it might be better to buy those new, not used.
josefresco
For those wondering (like me) the normal price for the CHUWI LarkBox X is about $190.
bizzleDawg
Does anyone have any useful rules-of-thumb or heuristics for balancing this trade off of upfront cost v.s. power cost? e.g. how much does an N100 cost to run for a year v.s. say a i5-2400s (the CPU for the first row on the linked site)?
mpol
I used to calculate costs of lightbulbs: 1 Watt running the whole year, at 0,28 eurocent/kWh costs 1 Euro per year. Until someone corrected me and it turned out that every 1 Watt 24/7 will be 2 Euro per year.

In the US electric power might be cheaper. And if it's running only part of the time, you should adjust the calculation.

My desktop/server runs 24/7, so I prefer having a CPU with 65W TDP over one that is 125W TDP. That might run up to 120 Euro per year difference for me (if it would be running at 100% CPU).

gizmo
Real world energy use is nothing like what you see on spec sheets. And not just because manufacturers differ in how they compute TPD. And TPD is also not a good indicator for energy use at (near) idle. With underclocking/volting in the BIOS you can get a beefier CPU to outperform smaller CPUs per watt. Because CPUs get really inefficient as they use more power undervolted or capped high TPD chips might be much more power efficient in the real world than their low TPD counterparts.
mjcurl
I tried to find this out myself. All I could find easily was the TDP of different processors. But I'm not sure if it's a good measure of how much power it will use.
bizzleDawg
Yeah, exactly! I suppose that it's workload dependent to a great extent
tfryman
I went down this rabbit hole earlier this year. Best I came up with was to calculate the TDP at max for the whole year. Full TDP is unrealistic, but it gets us a worst-case "max running cost" . Energy for me is roughly $0.12/kWh, so the yearly max running cost for a 35W TDP is $36.79, 65W is $68.33, and the 95W would be $99.86.

I ended up going with a HP EliteDesk 800 G5 Mini I5-9500T (35W) off of Ebay for $100 and it does the stuff I need it to do just fine. According to my current monthly power usage graph, it's averaged 7W which accounts for $0.61 of this month's power bill.

teamonkey
The only real way of knowing is to measure it. If you already have a system in place an energy monitoring smart plug can help you calculate the current running costs and help estimate the savings of using a lower-power machine.

When I did this I was surprised by how much - or how little - it cost to run various devices. It's quite addictive.

It's not always accurate because a lower-power machine doing the same task will often need to work at its full power more often, so the savings may be less. For example, a Raspberry Pi 5 may often be more power effecient than a Pi 4, despite drawing more power at full capacity on paper, because it spends less time at full capacity than the Pi 4 does.

On the other hand, when I upgraded my work PC I found it used less power but I also had to run my office heater more often in winter, as the new PC wasn't as efficient at heating the space.

bee_rider
No, sadly the TDP tells us every little about the idle power cost, which might be where you spend most of your time depending on the workload.

Just from tweaking my laptop, I’ve noticed that when it is really idle (or I’ve intentionally put it in a low frequency mode), the big power drains are the wireless interfaces (don’t forget bluetooth) and the screen (OLED helps as long as the screen is mostly black). Gotta tweak the whole thing.

boredpudding
If a Kwh of power costs $ 0,30, then 1 watt = $ 2,63 a year. (0.001 kwh * 24 hours * 365 days * $ 0,30).

So, it goes quite quickly. Savings of 20 watt save you $ 52 a year.

kstenerud
My NUC13 with i3 has a nominal 15w TDP, but while idling on a KDE desktop with a browser open to reuters (1 tab) it hovers around 3 - 4w (5% CPU usage). If there's REALLY nothing going on (no desktop even) it's 1.0 - 1.3w (1% CPU usage).

Edit: I should note that there's no fan drawing power because I put it in an Akasa passively cooled case.

mkesper
Reusing these boxes instead of having them thrown away and getting a new one built is better for the environment, though.
DCKing
I wouldn't automatically prefer any random N100 mini PC over a nice second hand enterprise mini PC.

In home server use cases, mini PCs stay idle the vast majority of their runtime. So it's idle power consumption that is the most useful metric to look into. The N100 can have great idle performance in theory, but most data I can find about N100 boxes is them idling in the 12W-15W range. This is something that older enterprise mini desktops have no trouble matching or beating [1]. Especially since roughly the Skylake era (Intel 6th gen), idle power consumption for enterprise PCs has been excellent - but even before then it wasn't bad.

Enterprise vendors like Dell/HP/Lenovo have always optimized for TCO and actually usually use quite high quality power supply circuitry, whereas most N100 mini PCs tend to be built with cheaper components and not as optimized for low power usage for the whole system.

[1]: I recommend reviewing Serve The Home's TinyMiniMicro project, which often finds the smallest enterprise PC form factors to idle at 8 to 13W, even older ones. Newer systems can get below 7W! https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

switchbak
One can also do things like undervolting to reduce the power draw even more. Modern BIOSs can give a lot of freedom for underclocking/volting, not just pushing things to consume more power.
SparkyMcUnicorn
Power usage on these mini pcs is actually pretty decent.

I have a bunch of SFF computers (Dell 7060, HP 600 G4, etc) with i7-8700 or similar CPUs. They all idle around 12 watts.

Most of the mini pcs use the T version of the processors, which are usually 35w TDP.

Power usage will definitely be higher than an N100 (65W TDP vs 6W), but they're a lot more versatile since you're getting more than double the performance, 2-3x the threads, and an iGPU that can do things like transcoding for plex and accelerate ML models for Frigate/Scrypted.

some-guy
N100's QuickSync has been good enough for me for Plex transcoding FWIW, though maybe your demands are higher than mine in terms of resolution
JamesSwift
I think HTPC hardware transcoding is basically the sweet spot use case for the N100. Its less good compared to alternatives for pushing the game emulation performance.
shiroiushi
Can it do that while also running 4 drives in a ZFS RAID array? I've been thinking about building such a system but haven't decided on the CPU yet, so I'm afraid of getting something too underpowered.
SparkyMcUnicorn
In `top` you won't notice a difference in cpu utilization for the transcoding work with an intel iGPU (as long as transcoding is being handled by it, of course).

The N100 is definitely powerful enough run a ZFS RAID array. Depending on what all you'd like to run, it might be enough. Check it out with cpubenchmark's compare feature!

I used a Celeron G4900 (also has an iGPU) as a plex server for years, and it's half as powerful as an N100. The celeron is a fairly slow processor, but for plex it was enough since the iGPU did the heavy lifting.

shiroiushi
Very interesting, thanks! What about adding a few other server tasks, like automated backups, and running Immich (Google Photos clone)? I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information online, with some people swearing by the N100 as a home server capable of these tasks, and others saying it's just too slow and something like a Celeron 13100 is needed. Since I can't exactly build a system, and then return the motherboard/CPU if it's too slow, I'm a little afraid of under-speccing it. My goal is to have a 3-5 drive system with ZFS, and use it for NAS, Jellyfin (with 4K transcodes, because of subtitles; probably never more than 1 movie at a time though), Immich photos, and backups.
SparkyMcUnicorn
You're definitely limiting your upside with an N100, but it might be enough like I said. It'll work, it's just a matter of how fast it'll be with everything you put on it.

I'd highly recommend joining the serverbuilds dot net discord. They also have a forum with pre-specced NAS build configurations, complete with pricing. People there are very helpful and will give realistic advice.

I think Jellyfin beats Plex on 4k transcoding (tonemapping?) with the iGPU, but fwiw I do not transcode 4k and add subtitles to them just fine. I use an nvidia shield, which direct plays 4k content with the added subtitles. Hearing about transcoding 4k content just to add subtitles is news to me.

mdasen
Power consumption is definitely a big deal. I replaced an old PC that I'd been using as an always-on device with a tiny PC (i7-8700T) and it saved a ton of power. Given that power rates in New England are around $0.30/kWh, saving 50 watts means saving $128/year. I went from using around 60 watts to 10 watts at idle (and going from 110 watts under load to 50 watts).

The new computer cost me $240 back in late 2022 (with 32GB of RAM and WiFi) so it'll basically pay for itself in electricity savings - and it's 3x faster than what it replaced.

ServeTheHome has some good reviews: https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/. The tl;dr is just that there's good options from Dell, HP, and Lenovo and the differences are kinda minor, but it's a good source if you care about specific information and teardowns.

It's a great little machine, takes up almost no space, it's almost silent, and it was basically free with the power savings - in fact, once I pass the two year mark, it was cheaper to get the new hardware than to keep running the old.

And you can put Proxmox on it as a hypervisor to run multiple OSs or containers.

kjs3
The N100s are everywhere, but I think the N305 with 8 E-cores is the bomb for a home server at slightly more power consumption.
kjkjadksj
Those are at the price point where other options like enterprise mini pc make more sense
kjs3
Well, I guess if you make no effort to understand other peoples use case, you can make sweeping generalizations like that. If you need particular features, power consumption, or other factors, a 2-4 gen old used mini might not be the right answer.

Looking at the OP, there's a ton of i5-8500s in the same price range as a new n305 on Amazon (not bargain hunting here, I'm sure you can find either option much cheaper anywhere). Compared to an N305, a i5-8500 has less cores/threads (6), has al least 4x the TPD, and has a significantly worse GPU. And many people want to buy new. But the used i5 is more expandable, and particularly affords more max memory.

There isn't one uncontested "best".

BizarroLand
If the system draws 65 watts and you pay 12 cents/kwh, then it will cost you right at $68.377 dollars a year to run it at full tilt.

Math: 1,000 watts /65 watts/hour = 15.384 hours per kwh. 365.25 days/year * 24 hours/day = 8766 hours/yr <=(accounting for leap days) 8766 hours/yr / 15.384 hours/kwh = 569.81 kwh/yr 569.81 kwh/yr * $0.12/kwh = $68.377/yr

For quick math where accuracy isn't very important, at $0.12/kwh it will cost you ~$1.05/year per watt (65w = $68.38/yr), so every watt you save per year is a dollar in your pocket.

Of course, there are ways to reduce the energy usage of a system, a computer rarely has to run at 100% 24/7/365 unless it is very underspecced for your use case, even things as simple as enabling C states and not utilizing all of the PC resources available will save you many dollars a year.

molticrystal
It would be awesome if you included shipping in the total price(or at least for certain countries). I know bookfinder does that, as some people add an extra $100 to several hundred dollars to the price which skews the results.

I think ebay technically frowns upon excessive shipping as some sellers use it to get their items higher in certain search results due to a low base price, but ebay doesn't really apply enforcement to their sellers on these soft violations most of the time.

-----

It seems some of your filters like "storage type" are must include and when unchecking it all the results disappear, while others like "OS" seem like a filter and when unchecking the results increase.

------

I'm not seeing many chromeboxes in the results so maybe they are being filtered out?

mjcurl
Thank you, I have fixed the "OS" filter to be must include.

Chromeboxes don't come up much for the search I'm using. I think I could try a separate search for them.

Regarding shipping, I'm not sure how to include it, since it requires the user's location, which would take this over the API limits. I'm going to add more marketplaces, and maybe product locations. Which country are you shipping to?

throwup238
Maybe just take an average of shipping costs to a few locations (West coast Us, East coast US, Europe) and filter out anything where the shipping cost is greater than the cost of the product itself.

Or just get a shipping estimate to the same city as the seller is in.

Qerub
Adding product location would be great! As a resident of the European Union I'm unlikely to order one of these mini PCs from the USA due to import taxes and additional shipping costs.
chazeon
I think shipping costs varies wrt where you live.
jacky_tuning
A $38 lenovo cost me $633.90 with the shipping costs, from US to Switzerland i guess :D
smashah
Amazing! A few more filters (e.g location) and this would be an amazing tool for buying locally. bookmarked!
kylecazar
I had largely written off eBay some years ago after some bad experiences -- but this tool just showed me some pretty insane deals on custom PC builds over there.. Neat.
j0d1
This is really neat! I would love to see something similar for laptops. I bought a used Lenovo T80s (8th generation i5 CPU / 8GB of RAM / 256GB SSD) for 150$cad on eBay to work on my product (web app) and it is working flawlessly with Debian.
iforgotpassword
Maybe consider adding Fujitsu as a manufacturer. At least here in Europe they're fairly common in business environments so get tossed on ebay quite frequently. I've had very good experience with their stuff over the past decade.
weweweoo
Definitely do that. Old Fujitsu thin clients make awesome DIY routers.
CRConrad
> Maybe consider adding Fujitsu as a manufacturer. At least here in Europe they're fairly common

Probably because they bought ICL (which IIRC had itself recently bought Nokia's PC business) around the turn of the century.

wan888888
The joy of living in Australia: $38.00 + $710.23 shipping
haunter
Don't bother with eBay, you can get refurbsihed ones in Australia too

A$115 example, https://www.australiancomputertraders.com.au/hp-elitedesk-80...

deamanto
Very coincidental with this post as I just started looking into creating a home server for the first time and decided that mini PCs were sufficient for my use case (originally was going with Small Form Factor).

Just bought a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro from this website for <300AUD. I heard they were pretty decent for used PCs. The price difference isn't too far off from the USD equivalent here.

overcast
Been using a Beelink SER6 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 5 6600H, 16GB DDR and 500GB NVME for the last year or so with PopOS as my daily driver and loving it. With a portable monitor makes remote work great for $351 and $100 for the monitor!
InMice
I have a beelink, have had no problems except the original SSD in mine failed suddenly in <1 year. I'd recommend anyone getting a beelink to swap out their SSD with a crucial, kingston, samsung brand etc before putting the pc to use.
whiterock
Could you add Geekbench scores? I‘d love that :)
eskibars
This is awesome. I used to build a lot of stuff with various single-board computers (Raspberry Pis, etc) but realized I could get way more performance and expandability with these mini PCs if the form factor didn't require it.

One other thing I'd be interested in: not just mini PCs but used office workstations. I realized that many offices were selling old workstations that were often just a few years old with things like dual Xeon chips and 64GB of RAM or more with support for a few hundred GB for only a few hundred $. Things like 2ish generation old HP Z400/Z600/Z800 series. They make for great home lab virtualization machines and can often support 2+ GPUs and a boatload of additional peripherals. I'd love to see something like this that lets you find those as well

mjcurl
I was actually going to make one for workstations, since that is what I thought the best deal was for my home server. Then I did some research, and realized mini pcs are a better deal now. Still might build it though.
mydriasis
For reference, I thought I'd outline the baby PCs I use, since we're chatting about baby PCs. Maybe someone will find this useful. I use thinkcentre M92p SFFs for easy server boxes. Some things I like: - Bountiful - Cheap -- they can be had for under $100 each - Pretty powerful considering what you're paying, too! - Use common desktop parts for the most part - Accepts low-profile PCIe equipment ( network cards for ethernet, wifi; GPUs ) - Repair & replacement parts are CHEAP

Some things I don't: - I've had to do some ridiculous things to get them to behave after installing Linux, like tricking the BIOS to deal with UEFI correctly - It's basically impossible to get a better power supply, so you're limited with how much each one can do. Don't expect anything better than a very low-power, low-profile GPU for example. - There's not a ton of room in the case, so if you want PCIe stuff you will need low-profile. You can definitely stuff lots of hard drives in there if you work at it, though.

And, maybe someone has advice for me...!

haunter
> I've had to do some ridiculous things to get them to behave after installing Linux, like tricking the BIOS to deal with UEFI correctly

Strange. I use Dell Optiplex Micros which are pretty much the same. I’ve never had a problem installing any Linux distros or hypervisors (Proxmox and XCP-NG)

bitmasher9
I’ve bought 3 used Dells, mostly Optiplexes, over the decades for dedicated hardware for Linux based projects. They always seem like a good deal, and I surprisingly never have problems with them. These are fleet computers that get gently used during business hours that have IT departments that replace computers on a time schedule. Outside of one HDD that didn’t last a year of heavy file traffic I haven’t had really good luck with these machines.
haunter
>These are fleet computers that get gently used during business hours that have IT departments that replace computers on a time schedule

Yeah these are the ones I'm buying too. Lot of banks have these for example as an all-in-one docked into a monitor. Sometimes they even have a small amount of Dell warranty left, though I've never ever had a problem with them.

ilikepi
> Sometimes they even have a small amount of Dell warranty left, though I've never ever had a problem with them.

Yes, though technically any add-on warranty coverage or service plans are only available to the registered owner. I bought a couple Dell OptiPlex micros last year that were originally owned by a large organization. They were clearly being resold on eBay by someone who had acquired them in some sort of bulk purchase. Dell has a form you can submit to request that the registration be updated, but it requires you to provide contact information for the original owner. I asked the eBay seller if they for this contact information, but they said they did not. I was able to open a support request with Dell and have their records updated to show me as the owner after showing evidence that I had acquired the machines. This included a photo of them showing their asset tags along with a hand-written note that showed my support case number, as well as a copy of the eBay listings. I believe Dell checked with the original owner (a US federal agency) to verify the machines had been sold.

haunter
Thanks that's helpful. I still have two with warranty until January so I might try my luck with Dell
transpute
Dell ProSupport is exceptional and worth extending. Rapid access to competent technical human in US mainland.
vladvasiliu
Same experience as you with HP Elitedesks. At work we used to use those for people doing regular office things. I have a few G2s (i5-6500) and they work flawlessly with Linux, including using my own secureboot keys.
mydriasis
It was so bizarre. I'd get a "No Operating System Found" message, and had to go toy with the UEFI config. Eek!
rjst01
> I've had to do some ridiculous things to get them to behave after installing Linux, like tricking the BIOS to deal with UEFI correctly

I would suggest going for a couple of generations newer - the M92p is from an era before UEFI became really stable. For automated testing of my startup's product we have a testlab of tens of older USFF desktops and the M700/M900/M910 machines are some of my favorites. They're also just before the cut-off for Windows 11 support so they're still available dirt cheap.

Two things to watch out for - the M700 lacks a PCI-E M.2 slot - the internal M.2 slot supports only SATA M.2 drives. Second, the front USB ports failing is a really common failure mode.

mydriasis
Ooo that's _gotta_ be what it is. Just the most bizarre UEFI issues. I luckily found an incantation that works in a pretty general way for M92ps, but had I not I'd have some bricks laying around.

Those M900s look REALLY nice!

swills
I have some M910q that I am very happy with. UEFI is well supported, I was able to upgrade them to 32gb of RAM, i7 7700t and both a 512gb SSD and NVMe for mirrored storage. Highly recommended. Sure, it would be nice to get something newer than 7th gen, but it's still highly capable, small, quiet and fairly low power usage.
gizmo
That's very cool. I ultimately concluded that those mystery brand Chinese fanless mini pcs from Amazon (essentially laptop hardware in a tiny enclosure) offer a better deal. Minimal power usage, fast networking, real USB-C, and NVMe drive support. Old hardware is bulky, makes noise, and outputs too much heat. Even the truly tiny mini pcs -- the kind that fit in your back pocket -- are fast enough for a NAS or TV media player.
kyriakos
They are usually a lot more expensive because they come with newer CPUs.
bArray
For UK shoppers looking for a cheap laptop, the Dell Latitude E7240 is a solid machine [1]. For about £50-£60 delivered you can get a 12.5" machine with a ~4th gen i5, 4-8GB of RAM and an SSD. It's great for Teams/Zoom and the keyboard is very nice to type on.

My personal one has 12GB of RAM (4+8) and two SSDs (there is a spare slot for a half size M.2. inside). You can abuse the hell out of them and they take it.

[1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=Dell%20Lati...

xhrpost
I've been loving the recent attention to mini PCs here. I've had hobby projects put off for a while as I tried to find the best R-Pi clone, only to buy one and struggle just to get it to boot. Then I pick up a used mini PC on ebay for like $42 shipped, power cord and everything and even a 500gb SSD. Now I have a server running at home and am actually working on projects again, oddly for probably less than what a Pi clone costs after you buy enough accessories to use it.
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roflmaostc
difference might be that a Raspberry Pi consumes < 10W.

An old PC draws easily 5-10 times more energy.

Depending on your location, the yearly cost of running a Pi is around ~10$. The big machine then 50-100$. So energy wise, a small power efficient machine might be more expensive but the running cost could be lower.

throwaway984393
Not only excess power draw, but excess heat, which then needs more power for the AC to cool the home
switchbak
I have a little Intel i5 behind me all year long, and I don't notice any effect on the temperature of this (small) room. 12 watts is not a lot of heat to be dumping.

This is really small fry compared to other HVAC efficiency concerns, and definitely not an issue outside of summertime temps in most locales.

My Threadripper on the other hand - I had to move that into the crawlspace as it was: a) loud as hell, and b) basically a space heater that also does useful compute. 160w idle, ~280w full tilt - that thing is very noticable.

brewtide
>12 watts is not a lot of heat to be dumping.

Just as a reference point, straight up "electric heat" is basically 250 watts A Foot.

declan_roberts
This is exactly why I upgrade my old 2012 server. I was able to cut the power usage (and heat generation) by over 90%.

It makes a big difference in the summer, but I miss it during the winter.

cdaringe
Agreed. Related, disappointingly, the new pi5s don’t have much in the way of running in a lower power state. I gather it’s mainly the cpu, but my new pi5 runs hot doing a whole lot of nothing. Cooling solution is pretty much required. I am very content with perf, but it actually brings too much juice to the table for the tiny apps im running. Sure, another soc would be a better fit power wise, but the ecosystem keeps me locked in!
dkasper
I agree, might buy another pi 4 for my next project. The new chips are interesting though.
bloomingeek
You might consider a pi 5. I'm using it after I installed the NVMe top mount hat. (Where I loaded Raspberry OS.) It really speeds everything up!

BTW, I'm using a M.2 2280 drive, even though the hat is designed for shorter drives. (I just tied mine down.) I installed it over the CPU fan and it works great.

dkasper
depends on the project and whether it needs the speed vs the cost & power savings, same as buying an old pc
SparkyMcUnicorn
As noted in my other comment, my SFF computers with i7 CPUs idle around 12W. Roughly $20/year with my usage in a home server setup.
auspiv
mini PCs are < 10W also.

I have a full on Dell Optiplex 3070 (i5-9500, 1x16GB memory, 512GB NVMe) running windows 10 that idles at 8W.

I have a lenovo m92p tiny (i5-3570s, released 2012) that idles at 6W.

xhrpost
It's a fair point but as others have noted, these mini PCs can be very power efficient. I still need to hook up a meter to mine to see what the wattage is but I'm sure it's far below a typical desktop PC.
vel0city
My mini PC I use as a router with an N3710 CPU uses like 5W idle with a SATA SSD. It's a 6W TDP. Running full tilt is like 10W.
vladvasiliu
As others have said, this needs to be qualified. My HP Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF qualifies as "old" I think, yet it draws 14-15W at idle, measured at the outlet.

It has an i5-6500, 32 GB RAM, 2 SATA SSDs and a 4-port i350 NIC (all ports up). Idle means OpnSense and HomeAssistant running inside KVM on top of whatever kernel version was current in Arch at the time, but with no traffic.

Does the raspberry pi draw 1-3W only? It should be noted that old pcs like these can be had extremely cheap, so the difference in price should take this into account. Moreover, if you need extensions of any kind (NICs, drives), getting them running at all on a PI is somewhat more involved than on a standard PC.

j45
I have owned gen 5/6/7/7 devices, Gen 8 delivers the idle power much more honestly and it can be measured quite easily.

In either case, USFF is an order of magnitude less energy than desktop so it's still a win most of the time.

vladvasiliu
> Gen 8 delivers the idle power much more honestly

What do you mean by this?

> In either case, USFF is an order of magnitude less energy than desktop so it's still a win most of the time.

Doesn't it depend on the actual CPU used? I have an HP Elitedesk Mini (which is basically a small laptop without a screen — the equivalent of the ThinkCentres mentioned in this thread) and the CPU is an i5-8500 IIRC. I don't think this particular configuration would draw much less power than a "regular" desktop / SFF, aside maybe from the RAM (it uses SO-DIMM). I've never bothered to measure its idle power draw, and don't have any comparable "full desktop" to compare.

I don't know if HP or Lenovo have models with laptop-class CPUs in this form factor, but I image that would be an actual improvement on the power draw. I did see however Chinese brands on Amazon sell models with those kinds of CPUs.

j45
Typo in my first sentence about the Gen 8. it should be "Gen 8 cpu's in a USFF appear to deliver lower idle power usage and lower high end power usage than Gen 6/7."

You're correct that some of these machines have desktop CPUs, what I discovered was they also have different classes of desktop CPUs.

The m920q/m920s appear to have differnet power usages an possibly different cpus, or at least they're configured different.

If I compare the two:

- m920q (USFF) can go as high as 135w: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...

- m920s SFF can go as high as 260w: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...

Additionally, if you look up the Gen 6/7/8 power usage for the cpu itself, you can see the idle and total is different as well.

The trick is Lenovo is far from the best priced USFF in this category for the same thing.

When I bought Lenovo, I wanted to try out Proxmox, had no interest in fighting with installation or drivers, an just picked something that had flawless installation... that has since improved with other manufacturers.

The tool from OP here is really cool - I'd probably add some from the spreadsheet I had built out but I haven't had to buy many more of these once I figured it out. Load them up with ram, a few ssds, a UPS and they're pretty solid.

weweweoo
Here's examples of idle power consumption of second hand mini-pc's i've tested, running Ubuntu, measured from the wall:

Dell Wyse 5070 with Pentium Silver J5005 ~ 5W

Fujitsu Futro S940 with J5005 as well ~ 7W

Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro with i5-10500t ~ 12W with two SSD's

In comparison, my Ryzen 7 server build consumes about 22W idle (before I added GPU), has 4x SSD and 4x RAM sticks. I like raspberry pi, but for most purposes an used mini-pc is a better choice.

sangnoir
The RPi Zero 2 W consumes ~ 0.6W when idling, and costs $15 new, or in the $25-30 range with a case and USB power adapter.
42lux
Talking about building a server with a Zero 2 W is a bit of a stretch. I have some running as airplay and Spotify connect clients + some environmental sensors but much more would be pushing it...
sangnoir
No where in the thread was the "building a server" use case defined - the subject was always-on costs. That said, an RPi Zero works perfectly fine as a pihole (DHCP + DNS server), WireGuard node, a git mirror (running Forgejo), and many more use cases that are not CPU-bound.

Obviously, Raspberry Pis, SFF boxes, workstations and rack mounted servers all occupy different niches (with some overlap). Anyone confidently stating that one could fully replace anther with no context of the workloads is wrong.

42lux
The OP of the comment you answered was pretty much talking about how he uses his mini PC as a server and doing projects on it... and ofc a zero can do everything but at what speed? IOPS is disturbingly slow. I like the Zero for what it is but it's just not a good server fit.
sangnoir
I mean, I do projects on mine too. Without OP describing what the projects are; you're assuming they are CPU-bound.

Speaking of my projects - the RPi is perfectly capable of working as a web crawler (at a page rate that may surprise you) as well as a media download client & transcoder (again, simultaneously transcoding a number of streams that may surprise you).

42lux
It's fine that it's enough for you and I applaud you. I was also not only talking about CPU but also IOPs some of us have more demand on what we call a server. I don't understand how you can be so defensive about a piece of hardware it's actually rather concerning and my zero w 2 does have problems with FullHD streams with high bitrates. It doesn't even have the io bandwidth to push more than one stream.
sangnoir
I'm defending "right-sizing' the compute to match the workload; and the RPis are entirely capable to handle most "ambient computing" batched tasks.

My homelab includes 1L PCs and 1 U rackmounts (actual servers) - I appreciate what each brings to the table.

weweweoo
Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.

The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.

So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.

antisthenes
The RPi zero 2 is nowhere near powerful enough to be used for multiple purposes as any of the above machines.

It could probably run a single-task relatively well, like PiHole or something, but otherwise it's in a completely different performance category. Like an order of magnitude.

So 6W idle for J5005 would put it on the same level of efficiency.

sangnoir
You're right, the RPi zero 2's CPU is slower - but that doesn't matter for non-interactive tasks. I don't care that my cloud backup export cron job runs 5 minutes (or hours) longer on the Pi than on a Nuc; I only care it happens daily. For the CPU-/GPU-heavy workloads, the RPi Zero W is works as an orchestrator for the > 10W computer: powering it on and off as needed.
paulmd
Pi 4 is the smallest thing that would be remotely comparable to even a 14nm-era atom NUC in terms of usability as a fileserver etc
xhrpost
Add an SD card to that cost as well as an ethernet adapter, maybe wifi too? I'm not trying to bash on the Pi as option in all cases, just trying to note that in some cases, particularly hosting local services, it's likely not the simplest choice. Uses where I can see needing a Pi over a miniPC? Maybe 4k video playback, I'm not sure how well these x86 systems from 2011 can do that while some Pi's IIRC have onboard hardware for h265 decoding.
wkat4242
Wifi is included with the pi zero 2 W, hence the W.
notpublic
Have a used HP Prodesk 600 G3 with 16GB RAM running idle around ~12W. Bought it last year and its been running solid so far.
fud101
I've switched to a minipc as my main computer. I'll never go back. Went from a 16 core monster to whatever 4 cores this thing has and it's just as nice.
fossdd
I wonder why you switched and not use your 16-core PC? did it somehow broke or do you just like the benefits of a minipc?
bityard
Not who you are replying to, but likely: 1) heat 2) fan noise 3) power consumption.

I recently (8 months ago) replaced my 10 year-old laptop. The only reason I retired it was because the display was starting to go.

So I bought a second-hand workstation-class laptop with 6 beefy CPU cores and kinda wish I hadn't. Overall I want to like it but the battery life is abysmal, it makes a lot of heat even when fairly idle, and is a bit heavy due to the large heatsink inside. (And that's without a dedicated GPU.)

If I had to do it over again, I would trade it for one with a weaker but more power-efficient CPU.

dmonitor
Laptops are notorious for poor thermal management. I have no doubt that just about anything would be better than a "powerful" laptop.
sangnoir
Depending on your needs, Chromebook + headless workstation tucked away in a different room or garage could also work (with WoL/smart plug)
amelius
Is it possible to run Linux on all of them (so remove existing Windows)?

If not, maybe add a checkbox for it.

bityard
Linux will run on basically any x86 box.

The question of "how well?" is mostly down to the fact that some GPUs and wifi chips have substandard support due to their manufacturers' refusal to document their driver interfaces.