Selfhosted

A lot of the SBCs or n150 pcs have limited RAM upgradeability.

You might look at the old HPE Proliant Microservers, like gen8 - gen 10. You can get them with 16GB ram included for $300. They're low power and they use the cheaper ddr4 ram.

I find 8th gen i5 and i7 laptops under 200 all over eBay. Hard to beat.

After walking through CEX on the weekend I don't know if you will beat second hand laptop pricing. The significantly higher availability of laptops seems to make them prices that just can't be beaten.

Unless you can get away running a pi zero of course. Sorta tempted to get one but not sure how much I could get it to do. Would do data storage just fine, depending on how much space you need.

Optiplex etc. with an Intel 8th gen "T" chips seem to offer the best bang for the buck + energy efficiency on the second hand market right now.

The main issue with these thin clients is the lack of SATA ports and power connections for them if you want to add some larger 2.5” SSD/HDD storage. Usually it is only one, but you can also use the DVD drive slot with an adapter in the mid sized versions.

I'm a home-lab newbie but I built a NAS & Jellyfin server with a Raspberry Pi 5 and it works great. I got a SATA hat for it and it has 5x 8TB HDDs installed with ZFS RAIDZ1 in a custom 3D printed case. It can stream 4K on my network just fine. If there are other tasks you want your server to do or if you want to stream to multiple devices simultaneously I'm sure other people would recommend something more powerful but I just wanted to add my 2 cents. I picked up another Pi to set up tail scale (work in progress) and yet another Pi (open-box discount) to set up Immich (near-future project). I wouldn't expect one Pi to handle all of those things simultaneously but I haven't tried it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #31 for this comm, first seen 28th Jun 2026, 16:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Recently I decommissioned a Dell T320 and replaced it with a Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and 32 GB RAM all for right at the $200 mark. I'm running a total of 52 containers on it right now with load averages looking like 0.31, 0.51, 0.72. The Dell T320 running the same 52 containers cost me $40 USD per month to run. The Dell 7020 costs me $5-8 USD per month to run 24/7. If you wanted a wider tower, I set up a Dell 9020 for a friend of mine's son who wanted to get into selfhosting at the age of 10. Similar running costs. I've got an Optiplex 3020 mini with 16 GB RAM and a 4 TB external drive running Proxmox quite well and costs probably $3 USD per month. I'm pretty well chuffed with the performance so far of the 7020, and in fact am eyeballing another one to replace a second Dell T320.

look at used XPS line laptops. they have USBC TB3 that can have a ceiling of 40gbps throughput.

this means you can have a newish gen i7 with 32-64gb of ram with a hub for your networking and storage with a 40gbps bandwidth for it to pipe through. most of that will be available to you since you're not using it for video out.

keep in mind, Thunderbolt cables/hubs are graded and length of the cable will wreck your bandwidth ceiling. shorter is better. shielded is better.

I once had two XPS laptops networked over TB3 and was getting 10gbe on a 6ft cable. shorten it to a 10inch cable and it would have been likely 40gbe.

they do get warm, make sure you have good airflow and a decent pre-filter and you shouldn't have any problems.

the standalone laptops will usually run on 100-115w but using a TB15 dock you're looking at 125-270w. the TB15s are finicky on Linux so you might be better off using a TB3 rated pocket hub with power passthru.

good luck.

You can't really optimize for both power efficiency AND upgradability while choosing second hand USFF computers. Sort of have to pick a priority. I realized that electricity is relatively cheap where I am, and so older thinkstations with i5 or i7s are a great frugal option. Not so in, say, Europe.

M1 Mac Mini is quiet, fast, low power consumption and reasonably-priced used.

There was a link posted in this subreddit about power consumption comparison of different mini pcs (raspberry pi, n100, etc), and I regret not saving it.

This one?

I've been running an HP ProDesk 600 G4 mini (i5-8500T, 32 GB RAM) for a few years now and am very happy. I bought it with 8 or 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB M.2 for 140 €. It can fit one 2.5" SATA drive and two M.2 2280 drives. I have it running 24/7/365 with 2x2 TB M.2 SSDs and a 256 GB boot SSD and it usually uses around 7 Watts.

If you want to go the HP route, ProDesk 600 and EliteDesk 800 have two M.2 slots, while the ProDesk 400 only has one.

Alternatively, Lenovo and Dell also have similar formfactor PCs, but I don't remember their names.

Performance wise, the 8th gen i5 is more than fine for TrueNAS and 10-15 docker containers.

I looked at all the old thin clients and didn't like their power consumption to performance ratio. Ended up buying a cheap mini pc with an n100 and it's been amazing. CPU is max 15w, but mostly only 1 or 2w. Whole mini pc with an nvme draws only a few w most of the time. I bought it before all the craziness for £80, had it maybe 18 months now and no complaints. It's been rock solid.

I would get a Intel 6-8 gen i5 and then if you can afford it I would get some SSDs for data storage.

Keep in mind hardware prices are astronomic right now so you are unlikely to get a good deal

Go for a n100 or even one with an Atom CPU. Get as much ram as you can afford...

Regarding strictly cpu/power consumption ratio I guess the mac mini is pretty good.