Used HP Desktop Minis beat thin clients for a homelab in 2026
The best value I’ve found this year for a homelab server is a used HP Desktop Mini (the “DM” in the model names) from the G4 generation, which shipped with Intel 8th-gen Core chips. It’s a mini PC rather than a thin client, but it sells used for close to thin-client prices. I bought two, a ProDesk 400 G4 and an EliteDesk 800 G4, to replace the Dell Wyse 5070 and OptiPlex 3000 thin clients from my last post about them.
The thin clients are the cheaper, low-power tier:
- The Dell Wyse 5070 ($43 with 8GB, + $15 for a power adapter) has a 4-core Celeron J4105 that scores 1,060 single-thread and 2,807 multi-thread on PassMark. It takes an M.2 SATA drive but no NVMe.
- The Dell OptiPlex 3000 thin client ($84 with 16GB) has a 4-core Pentium Silver N6005 at 1,763 and 5,225. Its one NVMe slot officially takes only the short 2230 (30mm) size.
The HP Desktop Minis cost a little more and score 1.5 to 3.4 times as high as the thin clients on multi-thread:
- The HP ProDesk 400 G4 DM ($85.49 with 16GB and no drive, + $31.73 for a 256GB NVMe and about $10 for a 65W power adapter) has a 6-core Core i5-8500T at 1,998 and 7,734, and one full-length 2280 (80mm) NVMe slot.
- The HP EliteDesk 800 G4 DM ($109.99 with 8GB and a 512GB NVMe, + $15.98 for a 90W power adapter) has a 6-core Core i5-8500 at 2,428 and 9,499, and two 2280 NVMe slots.
Besides the speed, both i5s have AVX2, the vector instructions some software requires. The thin clients’ Celeron and Pentium Silver chips have no AVX at all (Intel confirms it for the N6005). That rules them out for the Frigate security camera recorder, for one, which crashes at startup with Illegal instruction on a CPU without AVX.
eBay sellers price RAM inconsistently, and a 16GB unit is often listed at or below the 8GB one, so sort by model and open each listing instead of filtering for 8GB to save money. The ProDesk 400 is HP’s budget line, with DDR4-2400 rather than 2666 and no vPro, Intel’s remote management that gives you a console on a headless box. If you want vPro, step up to the ProDesk 600 G4 or the EliteDesk 800 G4.
Most of these ship without a power adapter, and the right one depends on the CPU’s wattage. The ProDesk’s 35W i5-8500T runs on HP’s 65W adapter. The EliteDesk’s 65W i5-8500 needs the 90W adapter (19.5V, 4.62A). I bought the 65W one for the EliteDesk first, and it wouldn’t boot. There was no video, just the power LED blinking and the beeper going three long, three short. HP’s beep and blink code page lists that as code 3.3, a timeout during graphics initialization, so nothing about it points at the power adapter. On the 90W adapter it booted and passed MemTest86. Check the barrel too. Both of mine take the 7.4mm tip, and HP sells the same wattages with a 4.5mm blue tip. The model number won’t tell you the tip. The blue-tip 90W I bought by mistake says PPP012C-S, and HP sells 7.4mm 90W adapters under the same number, so go by the tip in the listing photo.
Dell’s OptiPlex 3060 and 7060 Micro are the same 8th-gen class, and so is Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M720q. The Lenovos list for a lot more than the HPs and Dells with similar hardware, though the M720q is the only one of these that takes a PCIe card, through a riser on its internal x8 slot (ServeTheHome’s review). When I checked listings in August, a 10th-gen i5-10500T with 16GB and 512GB (an HP ProDesk 600 G6 or EliteDesk 800 G6) ran about $200 delivered, and the cheapest 12th-gen equivalent, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M80q Gen 3, came to roughly $290 once matched on RAM. lowcostminipcs.com aggregates the eBay listings, but its prices leave out shipping.
Unlike the thin clients, the HPs have a fan, and they draw about twice the power at idle. ServeTheHome measured 11-12W on a six-core EliteDesk 800 G4 and 10-11W on a ProDesk 400 G4, against 4.9W at long idle in the Wyse 5070’s Energy Star listing. I haven’t put any of mine on a meter yet.