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 😄

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    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)

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Eldaroth@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          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 😂

          • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            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

          • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            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.