I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned it, but I recommend going with an Intel processor (8th gen or newer). This gets you Intel QuickSync (hardware video encoding/decoding) and an integrated GPU, making 4K video transcoding/playback a breeze. This opens up possibilities like Jellyfin, Frigate, and improves performance significantly for Immich.

I’ve got an i5-8500T (no external GPU) that’s managing 6x always-on security cameras in Frigate and Jellyfin streaming for 6 family members (local and remote with transcoding), plus a dozen other docker containers for Home Assistant/websites/*arr stack plus 4 always-on Linux VMs for various other projects, and the CPU sits anywhere from 30-60%. It’s amazing how capable old CPUs are as long as they have hardware video codecs.

Your biggest concern is going to be RAM. The more things you want to run on the server at once, the more RAM you’ll need. I need 64GB for my above stack for example.

I think a used laptop or NUC-style mini PC is a great choice for a starter setup! Especially something with onboard soldered RAM, because this will be somewhat immune to the current RAM pricing crisis. If you can force the laptop battery to only charge to 50% in BIOS, you get a free UPS with little risk of battery death. You can always migrate to something more permanent/expensive if you enjoy the hobby.

Whatever is available on your local secondhand market. Mini PCs are usually pretty good. Less standard parts though, same with brands like Dell, HP, Lenovo.

Get a NUC or one of those mini Lenovo things that show up in lots of homelab photos.

no risk of laptop battery swelling

This is wrong. Any device with a battery can swell.

Welcome to the hobby! It’ll consume your free time and (if you’re the right kind of person) deliver lots of satisfaction.

I usually get amazon renewed dell, hp Lenovo here in the States. Laptops usually just come down to specs. Though I usually see them for around $250-$300 usd so a bit over your budget but will depend on what you can find more local to you.

These mini enterprise PCs pack a big punch for their size for desktop options. Might be able to find some if a local IT company is dumping old inventory near you

a PC is better because of 24/7 reliability, better cooling, no risk of laptop battery swelling, easy RAM and storage expandability, and low idle power consumption

On the other hand

• laptops are sometimes recommend due to the battery acting as a built-in UPS. That means the system should truly be reliable 24/7, even in the event of a power outage
• with that said, you want to ensure that whatever laptop model you’re looking at supports battery bypass charging so you don’t risk the battery swelling that you mentioned. When the battery is full while plugged in, if the laptop is still routing power through the battery, yeah, you risk swelling. But if the laptop is set up to pull power directly from the wall without going through the battery first (only switching to battery power in the event that it gets unplugged or whatever), it’s no different than a UPS battery
• some laptops cannot be upgraded at all, but memory/storage are the two most common upgrade paths for the many laptops that actually are able to be upgraded with standard SODIMM, NVMe, etc. Just make sure whatever laptop model you’re looking at can be upgraded
• laptops are specifically designed to have a low power consumption, so I’m not sure what that point is about. Unlike desktop PCs, which are supposed to be plugged into power 24/7, laptops are intended to be used on battery power most of the time, so they want to make them last as long as possible on battery power by optimizing power consumption through efficient chipsets and whatnot. So even if you use it plugged in, it should still use little energy compared to a desktop workstation

With that said

• a desktop will undoubtedly have better cooling. Laptop designers sure put a lot of effort into creating very smart cooling solutions that work very well, but physics is physics. Comparatively, desktops are larger and more open, leading to naturally better cooling
• if a laptop has upgradeable memory/storage, at best, it will probably only have two slots for each. On the other hand, with a desktop, you often have the ability to use four memory sticks and a dozen storage drives.

IMHO RAM>CPU. Anything released in the past decade will kick ass if it has a good amount of RAM. I still game on a 2016 desktop PC.

EDIT: Please correct me if I am wrong, but 10,000k INR =~ $100. If that’s the budget, then I highly suggest an IBM ThinkCentre Tiny. They use to sell for ~$100 (used or refurbished). They have no moving parts and make for great headless units.

Some mini-PC’s have room for more than one SSD. Those are more future proof. You can start with one SSD, discover what kind of stuff you run, only containers, only VM’s, or a certain mix of those. You can always add a second SSD later — when your enclosure allows it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #161 for this comm, first seen 7th Nov 2026, 19:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I have a dell optiplex micro that has been running pretty much everything in my home lab. They sell for $100ish on Amazon and eBay.

Lenovo M700q

Retired business or surveillance hardware is worth checking locally too. My two servers are repurposed NVRs running plain Ubuntu Server, and a Dell OptiPlex handles dev work. For that list, I’d start with the hardware you can get affordably and check its RAM capacity and drive connections before buying. Docker on plain Linux keeps things straightforward. With Immich, budget for a separate backup of the photos before it holds your only copy.

I bought myself an HP elitedesk G3 800, they come in three skews: mini, small form factor and tower.

I bought the tower. There is so much room. Look at the Elitedesk G4 800 because there you get 8 and 9th gen intel.

But I love mine, planning to put in three large HDD in her, already have two 2.5 SSD, I have been scouting ram and got relatively cheap second hand ram deals, with 32gb in the system. I am planning on getting the 7700t (the t variant is the low power draw version).

But the thing is quiet and can be upgraded but also just plonked on a desk and left to run no worries

Lenovo T-series is generally a good pick whenever you want to run Linux.

I’d say the same for their USFF and SFF form factors as well. Great systems for homelabs, I have several (and my laptop is a T495, and my son has my old T470s).

Problem with laptops and (u)SFFs is storage capability. If you want a NAS you need some sort of external JBOD or you will be limited to 1-2 storage disks (and possibly have to boot I.e. truenas from USB).

If you can find them with a PCIe slot (or extra m.2 slot that exposes 4 lanes at least), you should be able to get a RAID card and rig up a way to use eSATA and some sort of external disk enclosure though.

Pay attention to performance/watt. Consider different boxes for different roles if you want…I.e. ZFS doesn’t need a lot of processing power, but it does like RAM. If you have a system that can use dirt-cheap DDR3(L) like a 6th or 7th gen Intel, that may be a better choice for NAS-only.

Then use a more powerful NUC or (u)sff for proxmox and run LXCs or VMs on it.

If it’s just for storage, you can use a Pentium from 10 years ago without issues. My NAS currently runs on a Pentium G4560T (T suffix = 35W model), which is based on Kaby Lake (7th gen Intel). You can pick up one of these CPUs for stupid cheap, I think they go for maybe $5 or $10 here in the US. The NAS has not complained at all. That said, I am going to upgrade it to an i5-6500 I have laying around, but only because the i5 has vPro capabilities, which I utilize on my other machines.

I’m not sure where AMD started allowing PCI and USB VM hardware pass through. But Intel 7xxx and up allow for it. Which really opens up what you can do. I have a tiny HP business unit with a 7th gen i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB nvme sans psu. I picked up for 60 bucks on eBay plus shipping and taxes. PSU was about 16 dollars.

Proxmox as a hypervisor, patching my zwave and ZigBee USB dongle through to HA. HA running on 2 core and 4GB. I passed the rest of the CPU, RAM, SSD, mouse, keyboard and display off to Haiku. For a nice graphical local admin console. I could easily split off more from haiku and get a 3rd setup running under proxmox. As haiku doesn’t necessarily need more than half a GB of RAM and 20 to 30 GB of disk space and 1 core really.