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 😄
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’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.
Seems kind of pricey for that specific unit, but it should work well for just hosting simple services.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express Plex Brand of media server package SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #987 for this comm, first seen 8th Jan 2026, 07:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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 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 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.
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.
thanks
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)
I may, it was a massive work in progress that I never finished because life decided to beat the crap out of me for the last 3 years. I was trying to build a modular system that was 19" and 10" rack compatible and would have storage options as well. In this case its 2x Seagate external drives, and a WD external drive plugged in via USB3 and setup in a CEPH cluster.
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.
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.
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 😂
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
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.
