Small home servers
Small machines that suit a household: one new mini PC class, four used office machines and one single board computer.
Vendor specification sheets give us memory ceilings, slots, networking and processor options. None of these vendors publishes idle power at the wall, so every power figure on this site is our estimate with the reasoning shown, and every purchase price is left for you to fill in.
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny: Eighth-generation Intel office machine, widely available second hand.
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2: AMD Ryzen version of the same tiny chassis, with more memory headroom.
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q Tiny: The business-tier sibling of the M720q, with vPro-capable networking.
- Intel N100 mini PC: The current default small new machine: a 4-core Intel N100 with Quick Sync, sold by many brands in similar boxes.
- Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro: Dell equivalent of the ThinkCentre Tiny, same era and same use case.
- Raspberry Pi 5: ARM single board computer, cheapest to buy and to run, with the tightest limits.
Compare a machine against your stack
| machine | class | planning RAM GB | planning cores | idle W (our estimate) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny | Used office tiny | 16 | 6 | 10 |
| Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 | Used office tiny | 16 | 6 | 10 |
| Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q Tiny | Used office tiny | 16 | 6 | 10 |
| Intel N100 mini PC | New mini PC | 16 | 4 | 8 |
| Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro | Used office tiny | 16 | 6 | 10 |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | Single board computer | 8 | 4 | 4 |