Hey guys, I was wondering if any of you have experience running their services on a Lenovo ThinkCentre, specifically a Lenovo ThinkCentre M70Q Gen1? From what I read they can be quite efficient when it comes to idle power draw.
I have the chance to buy a refurbished one for approx. €380, coming with a i5-10400T, 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD. Do you guys think the price sounds fair?
I am mainly looking to expand my Proxmox single host setup comprising of an Intel N150 mini PC with a second node as backup. Maybe down the line if I can get my hands on another affordable mini PC I might dabble in setting up a Kubernetes cluster. But that’s a project for another day 😄
Seems kind of pricey for that specific unit, but it should work well for just hosting simple services.
second this… I get quoted that in CAD… op should be closer to like 200£
I know this may not be a useful point, but just wanted to note that paying the equivalent of €380 here in the US would be an absolutely crazy price for a used edition of one of those. I’d expect those to go for the equivalent of 65-70 euros at the low end, around 100 fully loaded with the most useful parts. Even with international shipping, I’d think you could do drastically better.
From personal experience though, I run 4 of the Lenovo Tinys in my lab currently. I can highly recommend the M700/M900 line, M920 if you can get it, but the M70Q is fine.
Don’t forget about those prices:
Price of the article- Shipping
- Customs handling fees (at least in Germany and with DHL as the handler you can’t not have itbwithout jumping through some hoops. DHL Express does it free but you have to provide the info for customs)
= customs fees (article + shipping (+6€ customs service by DHL) + import tax (in Germany 19%))
And that quickly adds.
So assume 100€ for PC (IMO highly unlikely for those specs)- 30€ Intl. shipping from US to Germany (Assumption the parcel weighs >5kg and is tracked)
- 6€ for DHL
= 136€
136€ + 19% customs (either VAT or Import if it’s between private parties) = 161€
(Depending on the price, customs may cite you to their office to open the parcel to proof if the contents of the parcel are correct the value goes over 150€)
So yeah…Importing is quite a bitch.
Better to search within the EU (assuming OP is from the European Union or Schengen region)
I have a lot of services running on m90q with i5-6500t and 32GB ram. I got it for ~170$. CPU is definitely a bottleneck, especially with jellyfin transcoding but it only occurs when watching something immediately after importing. i5-10400t is a lot better than mine so I am sure you wont have any problems with normal usage. M70q is selling for around 350$ in my area.
I use a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q to host both Minecraft (Java edition) and Vintage Story server. I think that your ThinkCentre have a better CPU (mine is an i5 like, 6 gen), so, easily you could host many things without issue.
Ah nice, another vintage story aficionado 👌 Have my server running on my mini pc in a LXC since a couple of weeks, sadly haven’t found a lot of time exploring v1.21 since becoming a dad last year 😄
But yeah was looking for a bit beefier server hardware to maybe run some more game servers like Valheim or Satisfactory besides my other selfhosting services.
Oh boy I can finally talk about this! I had one of them and I can say proudly that baby will keep on chugging. That was my test bench and prod server all in one for media and learning containers. Solid workhorses and stable as hell. Def recommend if you can go to a salvage place to get the used older ram, if you can get so lucky.
I’m hosting most of my homelab off one m910q I got off eBay, with a 128gb M.2 SSD I bought separately. $55usd total. It handles around 15 services (including DNS and *Arrs) pretty well. Using a separate NAS for the actual storage and Plex streaming.
Used office PCs are some of the best value home servers you’ll come across. The Lenovo ThinkCentre, HP Elitedesk, and Dell Optiplex are fantastic machines with oodles of official documentation available straight from the OEM, and many come with built-in OOB management in the form of Intel AMT.
I have variants of all three. Love them.
