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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Which used enterprise micro PC on Ebay for $30 would you recommend? Trying to sort thru the trash and other options.

OP probably refers to Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PCs; they're well made, quite expandable and cheap, but if you can't find any, check out used Chromeboxes. They can be unlocked and reflashed with Coreboot in a single step, which makes them more secure aside allowing the native install of your OS of choice. Hardware quality is usually very good.

More info here: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/

Chromeboxes aside, I've installed various Linux distros on different MiniPCs and the outcome has always been great; the only caveat is to check if your particular model does like to be used without a monitor. In some cases they didn't and refused to boot, but I solved by connecting on the HDMI port one of those cheap "virtual monitor", "dummy monitor", etc. dongles sold to perform this exact function.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml

From the above site I landed on the Dell WYZE 7020 / Zx0Q... Some models of which have 4 cores (also accidentally bought a dual core version), supports 16GB DDR3, are passively cooled without a fan, and cost me about $50 on eBay (add $20 for a 16GB RAM kit to bring the total to $70)

It's about as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4, and has been great for letting me spin up a docker container to play around with a database or a message broker or what have you.

I limited my search to only fanless designs though; if you are fine with fans then I'm sure there are more performant options out there.

Sibling comment has good suggestions. I personally like Dell Optiplex models, e.g. 9020. Looks like right now the best you can do is about 40-45 shipped for a complete one, but I've snagged about six in the last year or two for 20-35. They come and go. Beware of sellers posting the same thing for 100+; they're worth max 50.

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