Hi,

I have outgrown my current home lab setup which currently runs many docker containers a Synology NAS and looking to build a Proxmox server/cluster on one or multiple tiny mini PCs.

I will be running small docker containers for things like home assistant, radarr, sonarr, grafana and maybe prometheus. Again nothing crazy in terms of resources but I would like to have some room to play around with other projects like kubernetes.

Here are few deals I’m eyeing and can’t decide to get one newer system or 3 older ones for essentially same price.

3 x Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Quad-Core i5-6400T 2.2GHZ 12GB 120GB SSD - £165
3x Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Mini PC Intel i3-7100T 3.4Ghz 12GB 256GB - £150.00
1 x Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny PC - i5-8400T - 8GB RAM - 256GB SSD - £145

I’m leaning towards lenovo mini PCs because I will be able to add 4 port nic via pci riser card.

M720q with i5-8400T has 6 cores and 6 threads plus intel 630 gpu which will be useful for plex transcoding.

On the other hand M910q with i3-7100T has only 2 core and 4 threads but also got intel 630 gpu. I will be able to get 3 of them for a price of just one M720q.

Lastly i5-6400T got 4 cores and 4 threads. Extra 2 cores more than M910q with i3-7100T but older cpu with intel 530 gpu which might not be as powerful plex transcoding

I’m thinking to go with just one M720q Tiny PC - i5-8400T mainly because of the cores count and intel 630 gpu. Obviously I will add min. 32GB ram.

I guess running 3 machines will use more power but they are already fairly low power so lets not take that into account for decision making ;)

Let me know your thoughts.