If you have a local e-waste recycling center, habitat for humanity, or similar, you should be able to find a decent laptop, which makes for a good homelab platform. A desktop with a somewhat recent CPU (Intel 6th gen at least, I would say) could also be a good option if you don’t mind a bit higher idle power usage.
Otherwise, ebay is a good non-local option. If you don’t need a lot of horsepower for what you’ll be hosting, a complete Dell Wyse 5070 thin client can be picked up for about $40. They’re super efficient little x86 machines that have an M.2 slot for an SSD and decent connectivity, and idle at around 6 watts.
If you need more power, you could step up to a retired office mini-PC. They usually draw around 10 to 12w idle from what I recall.
If you need even more power, and PCI slots, the 7th and 8th gen intel based office PC’s are a bargain, like the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF, Lenovo Thinkcentre M910s, or HP Elitedesk G3 or G4 SFF.
Where’s a good place for me to find cheap hardware? eBay? Something else? I have a couple projects I want to self host with
If you have a local e-waste recycling center, habitat for humanity, or similar, you should be able to find a decent laptop, which makes for a good homelab platform. A desktop with a somewhat recent CPU (Intel 6th gen at least, I would say) could also be a good option if you don’t mind a bit higher idle power usage.
Otherwise, ebay is a good non-local option. If you don’t need a lot of horsepower for what you’ll be hosting, a complete Dell Wyse 5070 thin client can be picked up for about $40. They’re super efficient little x86 machines that have an M.2 slot for an SSD and decent connectivity, and idle at around 6 watts.
If you need more power, you could step up to a retired office mini-PC. They usually draw around 10 to 12w idle from what I recall.
If you need even more power, and PCI slots, the 7th and 8th gen intel based office PC’s are a bargain, like the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF, Lenovo Thinkcentre M910s, or HP Elitedesk G3 or G4 SFF.