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 😄
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.
Seems kind of pricey for that specific unit, but it should work well for just hosting simple services.
Up to 300 or so could be reasonable if the RAM and SSD are decent.
second this… I get quoted that in CAD… op should be closer to like 200£
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.
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.
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.
That sounds pretty expensive, I got 3 M90q Gen 3 with the 12500T in 2023 for 350€ each, but I guess the current situation with the AI craze has brought their prices up quite a bit, better look at the minisforum
I’m now running 9 of the Dell equivalents to those, and they’re doing well. Average 15-20 watts at normal load and usually no more than 30-35 watts running full tilt. 5 of them are unprovisioned but I got a good deal on them for $25/each so I couldn’t pass them up :shrug:.
Attempting to cable-manage the power bricks for more than 1 of these is the worst part of using them. The only life pro tip I can offer is to ditch the power bricks and buy a 65W USB-C power delivery adapter that’s in the “wall wart” style and also one of the USB-C to Lenovo power adapter cords. Those make cable management so much better.
Wall Wart
Adapter Cable (these are for my Dells but they make them for most brands/styles)
Where the heck did you get them 25 bucks a piece?
Government surplus auction. Had to get power supplies and SSDs for them separately but still less expensive than what most used ones go for elsewhere.
Good on you!
Nice, great deal you got there! Would love to stumble upon a similar offering, would instantly build a Kubernetes cluster with them. Probably only to find out that it is too much of a hassle to run my homelab stuff in Kubernetes instead of Podman 😂
Yeah, I did Docker swarm on an older cluster of thin clients I had ~10 years ago but even that was overkill. I’ve avoided Kubernetes for the same reason.
Regarding deals:
If you are in Germany: Zoll-Auktionen does sell goverment surplus/decommissioned gear and also from seizes by customs.Sometimes there are decent offerings there
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.
That’s newer hardware than what i’ve got, and I know ram is expensive now, but I paid ~$100 USD for my thinkcenter M800 and it has been great.
Mine did not come with SSD though, and instead had a 3TB HHD.
the ram on ops model would be ddr4, not 5. pricing is not that bad on ddr4 if I’m not mistaken
The price of DDR4 has tripled over the last year. It’s still not as bad as DDR5 though.
That’s true and I hadn’t considered that. I’d still say they’re paying far too much.
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.
@Eldaroth I’m right now deploying one at home. A m720q with yunohost on it.
If it works well, it’ll become my main homelab, instead of my Synology.
Nice, good on you! Migrating your services/containers to a dedicated server instead of running them on a overwhelmingly underpowered Synology NAS is going to be a game changer.
I also have a Synology NAS, but nowadays only really use it for NFS/Samba storage and a S3 service (Garage) running on it to provide network storage to all my other services running on my mini pc.
@Eldaroth That’s definitly the plan :)
A new world of performance !
I have 2 of them with older 6 core CPUs and 32gb each. I also added a 10g SFP card in the PCIe slot so they would have a bit more umph.
For 380 each I would not bother, and I would look at the Minisforum MS-01 as it has built in dual 10g SFPs and dual 2.5g RJ45’s plus a PCIe slot.
https://minisforumpc.eu/products/ms-01?_pos=1&_psq=MS&_ss=e&_v=1.0
at ~80 euro’s more you get more CPU, faster ram if you can find it, more storage, and more networking.
Nice setup! Is that a Minisforum below the optiplex?
Haha I read your comment the wrong way around the first time thinking you got a Minisforum MS-01 for like €460. That would have been a great deal 😄
Because searching for what a new MS-01 with i5 and 32gb RAM and 1TB SSD cost is more towards €700. Haven’t found a lot of offerings for a used one in my region and buying new currently I think I would have to pay too much.
That looks nice, what sort of a container box is this? I always had just boxes all over the place, but now in a house where I got a chance to put it all into a neater place. So looking for something like your box there. Also appreciate any kind of price guide for it.
The wall mount rack is a used ACP Netshelter. I was able to find it on Craigslist a few years ago. The rackmount face plates are custom 3d printed but unfinished as I abandoned the project due to life.
Are those custom 3d printed rack mounts for the ThinkCentres? Got an STL to share? I’d love to print rack mounts for mine (m910q)
That blue led on the Minisforum sure is bright! BTW could you share the file for the bracket of the network card? I also have an M920q with a 10GbE card (single SFP), but I still have to figure out a bracket so at the moment it’s open, just a bit of tape under the card to not short it on the ports below.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LXC Linux Containers PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
[Thread #987 for this comm, first seen 8th Jan 2026, 07:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
