Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q

I've been running colinux for years until early 2009 when I reinstalled my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP in a VM. So much faster.

The best bang for buck at the moment seems to be tiny mini micro machines https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... Typically available regularly via ebay (or similar) as businesses rotate them out for new hardware. The other week I picked up an i5 9400T Lenovo m720q with 16GB of memory for £100 delivered. They practically sip power, although that's less true now I've shoved a 10Gb dual SFP NIC in there.

Some of the models do - I have the M720q and it has a small form factor PCIe 8x slot on the motherboard, but you need a proprietary riser board (cheap on aliexpress) to convert it to a real PCIe slot, and it takes the place of the internal SATA drive cage and rear port adapters (VGA or serial or what have you) so you can't use those. I'm using mine as an OpenWRT router with a dual 10 Gbe ethernet card in the PCIe slot ever since I got 10 Gbit internet at home and consumer 10 Gbit routers are expensive and leave a bit to be desired

The Lenovo m720q or the m920q. What makes them amazing despite their small form factor, is that they actually have a 8x PCIe slot you can use once you get a riser card for it. Either to add a GPU, Additional NIC or a HBA card to connect to a JBOD. I'm using a m720q as a OPNSense router and its been great.

My APU2 died few years back and haven't found a decent replacement. Instead I use a Lenovo Thinkstation M720Q off eBay with the PCIe x8 riser and Intel 2 port 10GbE card. You could also fit a 4 port 1Gb card too. The thing idles at 18-19W which is less than the big white rectangular Verizon "trash can" router which idled at 22W and has horrible WiFi (I use a Unifi APLR.)

Used Intel 8th gen based mini PCs seem like a pretty good value. 100-150 bucks for a pc from a somewhat reputable brand (lenovo, dell, hp) with slightly better multi core than N150 and ~6W idle if you manage to get it to stay in C10. Some of them have a low profile pcie slot, like M720q and M920q. Also the CPU is socketed so you could technically upgrade it to e.g. i9-9900K, at least the M920q is known to take one as long as you use a powerful enough PSU. Few of them (at least M920q) also support coreboot due to an Intel Boot Guard vuln which could be fun, I'm planning to look into whether it could be ported to my M720q as well.

It's nice to see a home lab on HN. Hardware has become a lost art for many. If you dont have a home lab, start one. Grab a 1l pc off of ebay. Think center m720q or m920q with an i5 is a great place to start. It will cost you less than 200 bucks and if you want to turn it into a NAS or an Opnsense box later you can. When it arrives toss Proxmox on it and get your toys from the community scripts section... it will let you get set up on 'easy mode'. Fair warning, having a home lab is an addiction, and will change how you look at development if you get into it deeply.