yeah it's the ThinkCentre, not the laptops. Looking around ~130 USD for a i5 with 240gb ssd and like 8GB refurbished.
Shitty deal tbh because I could maybe just build a small form factor rig right? like an i5 LGA 1151 chipset and 32GB ram? A better SSD, maybe even NVME if it's viable on the mobo.
Trying to strike a balance between a cheap setup and something that'll run as a low-energy/mid-weight office server
Probably can't beat the refurb
Also, it is battle tested to last, unlike new builds
so you rate a ThinkCentre would be the option?
Will save me the time and extra work too.
I'd like to run my sites on there and get off the shared hosting packages - starting to need more DBs and stuff too and I think it's probably the next investment to make
yes. I use refurbished Dell and HP's from 2016 era myself
My friend liked his ThinkCentre's
I guess I have to look at proper refurbisher/reseller - what price range is good, for what spec?
Depends , for $200 or less you can get something good, may need to upgrade RAM or buy gpu
If you need a gpu for anything, you need to research if the psu can handle it or upgrade psu too
Have an HP DL380 Gen 9 in my home lab (beefed up) and ended up in about 2 years to shutting it off and running my VMs on 2 small Dell Optiplex 3020 machines.
I would suggest looking into these small factor Dell machines too 🙂
nice, and what are you running spec wise?
How secure are these older machines? are you running proxmox or ubuntu server or what?
It requires a bit of extra resource management of course. One of the advices would be that if you are VMs rather than containers person, look into running Alpine as the OS.
P.S. Proxmox as the VE of course
