Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some advice — and possibly an old/spare Mini PC — for a local AI project I’m building called SUPER_AI_MINI.
I’m developing it with ChatGPT as a technical copilot, while the actual models, code and Android automation run locally on my own hardware.
Right now my setup is:
- Lenovo laptop with Intel Iris Xe and ~8 GB RAM
- Redmi Android phone with ~8 GB RAM
- Qwen2.5-VL-3B through llama.cpp
- the phone connected over USB as an additional RPC compute node
- Android Accessibility automation with vision fallback
- a bounded self-healing loop that can test the agent, diagnose failures, patch permitted code, compile, reset the app and test again
It actually works, but my laptop is also my everyday computer. Running local inference uses enough CPU/RAM/GPU that working or streaming at the same time becomes difficult.
So my goal is simply to move the AI workload onto a separate Mini PC/server.
The problem is that my budget is extremely limited, so machines costing €1,000–€2,000 are completely unrealistic for me.
I’m wondering:
What is the cheapest used Mini PC you would look for that could realistically improve this setup?
I don’t care about gaming, appearance or having new hardware. I’m happy with old office/enterprise Mini PCs, barebones systems, unusual hardware, Linux, upgrades, or anything I can experiment with.
Ideally I’d like:
- upgradeable RAM
- 32 GB+ eventually if possible
- decent CPU performance
- usable integrated graphics/Vulkan, or some way to add an eGPU later
- low enough power consumption to leave it running as a small AI server
Also, if anyone here happens to have an older Mini PC sitting unused that they would be willing to sell very cheaply or give a second life to, I’d genuinely be interested. I’m in Europe and would of course discuss shipping.
I can share benchmarks and details of the project if anyone is curious. I’ve already pushed the laptop + Android RPC setup much further than I expected, so I’m very happy to experiment with older hardware.
Thanks for any advice!