this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Not sure where you are located OP but, eBay, CraigsList, Goodwill, local Refurb shops, befriend a local IT person....business are always throwing out decent stuff. Just stay away from enterprise equipment. In my locale there are 'flea-markets', FaceBook Marketplace. @DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world suggested a Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro, and if you do some dilligent searching of Amazon, you can find some good deals on Used or Refurb computers.
This.
I look for corporate desktops that are off-lease or EoL. Big fan of Lenovo M series. 6th/7th gen still have lots of life left in them and plenty of power for most homelab tasks.
Anything much newer than that will consume less power per core (usually) but will cost more up front and probably be more expensive to put upgrades into (i.e. DDR5). Anything much older than that won't be worth the performance per watt. By the time you put a 7th gen through its paces, you'll be ready to upgrade and have a much clearer look at what you want/need.
Right now I've got 3x M710s forming a kubernetes cluster, and another running opnsense only.
Kubernetes was built on top of VMs in proxmox, but I'm thinking I will move them to metal.
I also have what was my PC down in the basement, with proxmox, running a TrueNAS VM and a Bazzite VM for GPU passthrough and Sunshine, but I'm gonna reclaim those guts, put a spare 6th gen with DDR3 and run TrueNAS on metal. Then I'll have my PC back.
I did a little passive research on the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro that @DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world recommended. For my locale you could run that 24/7 for about $2.00 USD per month. I like to stay in the DDR3 range of equipment because those are not nearly the same price for units using DDR4 or higher, and as far as performance goes, are still on the green of newer DDR4 & 5 units. Plenty enough computing power to handle a lot of Docker containers, etc.
Yeah the SFFs and uSFFs are great for consuming low power.
I've got a couple m910q's that I bought for htpc purposes but honestly I might be better off putting the thick ones on htpc duty. Just gotta work out some kinks with how they handle suspend when hooked up to a TV.
They've really shot up in price...I bought two for 130 shipped (total) with i5-7500T and 16gb back around last Halloween. I'm seeing singles not specced as well for the same price
The tough thing about uSFF is that they usually don't have any PCIe slots...so if you need a second NIC, or want to upgrade to mGig, you can't, or they have to be over USB 3.