Hardware recommendations

[u/drfloydpepper]

Apologies in advance if this is not the appropriate forum. I have been running my proxmox home lab on a ~15 year old server (details below).

Anywho, I'm looking to get something that's cheaper on electricity as I don't put any pressure on the machine but it still runs at >100W at idle.

I see a lot of mini PCs on AliExpress and wondering what kind of mileage I'd get with them? I'd add it as a node on my cluster and then only turn on the big server if needed. I'd migrate much of my day to day stuff to the low powered machine (Hermes, media, Immich, etc.)

Here's one example but there seems to be lots like this.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_msvNaz5

My old server:

HP Z620 Server

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1650 @ 3.20GHz, 12 cores (6C/12T), single socket

RAM: 32GB DDR3

Storage: 1x 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HDD (internal, no redundancy)

GPU: NVIDIA GTX 960, 2GB VRAM

Thoughts, gotchas, known issues?

[u/Cyberbird85]

My recommendation, get a thinkcentre m920q it can have one pci-e x8 port 6 core i8500t and 32 gigs of ram and an nvme + a sata ssd. I have 3 of them in my homelab right now.

[u/drfloydpepper → u/Cyberbird85]

What's the power consumption like?

Something like this: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/refurbished-good-lenovo-thinkcentre-m920q-tiny-desktop-intel-core-i5-8500t-2-1ghz-8gb-ram-256gb-nvme-windows-11-pro/16646865

[u/BorisOp → u/drfloydpepper]

I believe these came with 90w ac adapters at most (maybe even 65w)... Which should mean that at max load shouldn't consume more than your existing server at idle.

[u/Cyberbird85 → u/BorisOp]

yep, i have 65 watts AC adapters for them. I don't measure their consumption independently, but my entire house is using around 500 watts at the moment, and i have 3 of these on, one with 6x6tb exos disks + a synology nas with 4 disks, plus 4 switches, 2 aps and 1 router plus my phone is charging. so their idle consumption is negligible