Power consumption is a consideration though depending on your use case and setup. A Pi 4 draws about 3W on light load and these G3 Minis take 10-12W.

Of course if you deck out a Pi 4 with a SSD and a fan, it'll come much closer to the G3 Mini in terms of power consumption.

There is also a general improvement in code support by sticking with x86. I bought a similar 10 year old i5 based workstation dell and so many little things just work _better_. I didn't realize just how much of my battles were based on hardware architecture issues.

I love the principle of the mini elitedesks, but some have a terribly annoying fan. It's not firmly attached to the chassis, so it rattles while spinning (and it spins all the time). The heatsink uses a proprietary 3 point attachment, so you can't use a big aftermarket cooler instead (even though it wouldn't fit in the case, I would have accepted the compromise).

Not sure about the <=G3 and >=G7, but the G4 and G5 have the issue. The G6 seems to have the fan attached more firmly, but I've never tested one in a quiet room.

Hp Elitedesk and prodesk are the two 1L available models they have you want to hunt for.

Lenovo has M700, M75q (AMD) and a bunch others ranging from thin client to workstation performance.

Generally new ones are awesome at about $700 but older ones are absolutely capable for upgrading ram, disk, wifi whatever. there are modules for up to 10g and other things too. Servethehome on YouTube has a bunch of guides.

I did something similar too, just beware of refurbishers putting cheap/trash SSD disks in those machine, they can stop working all of a sudden sooner than later (I experienced that on my skin)

Some Dell Optiplex models are also much like this. I have a refurbed one I got for <£200 running services here at home (core i5, 16GB).

Similarly, I got a ThinkCentre M73 (8GB/128GB, Win10) on eBay for £125 3 years ago. It's great.

Agreed. Or if one lives near large research universities, they often sell off the equipment they no longer need for a solid deal. Sometimes they do sell computers, servers, monitors and such by the pallet, however, and I’m not sure anyone really needs a cluster that large at home haha

I've been fairly impressed by a couple of Beelinks Mini S12 I purchased a couple of weeks back. Intel N95 CPU, 16 GB RAM, 500GB NVMe. More than enough for checking email.

One was immediately wiped and I installed Debian 12. The other was wiped and I installed Windows 10 Pro. Both seemed to just work.

Hard to beat for less than $200 CAD.

Main home server/NAS is a Ryzen 7 Beelink with 64GB. Works a treat. Fan is audible when you're hammering the CPU (doing a large backup, unpacking downloaded media, running a Minecraft server with multiple users) but other than that it's not audible from ~5ft away.

I have a few of these that we use to test "low hardware resource" deployment scenarios, running Ubuntu. So far so good.

It seems to even support two 4k monitors (probably in 60hz)!

And they advertise up to 3 monitors support.

I'm always on the lookout for the beefier chromeboxes, they're pretty small physically and pack a lot of punch for such a little box. Asus chromebox 3/i7 is my favorite so far.