A used Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q at $100–130 beats a fully-kitted Raspberry Pi 5 at $120–140 on roughly 3× the CPU throughput, 2–4× the RAM, real NVMe plus SATA, Intel QuickSync transcoding, and universal x86 image support. The Pi's remaining advantages are idle power — worth about $8 a year — plus GPIO, size, and silence. So the 2026 answer is: mini PC for the main server, Pi for appliances. Here's the arithmetic behind that.
The head-to-head table
| Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB kit) | ThinkCentre M720q (i5-8500T, used) | |
|---|---|---|
| Real cost | $120–140 (board, PSU, case, storage) | $100–130 with 16GB/256GB NVMe |
| CPU (Geekbench 6, approx.) | ~800 single / ~1,650 multi | ~1,250 single / ~4,600 multi |
| RAM | 8GB, soldered | 16–32GB, two SODIMM slots |
| Storage | microSD, or NVMe via HAT | NVMe slot plus 2.5" SATA bay |
| Hardware transcoding | None usable for a media server | QuickSync: 3+ simultaneous 1080p streams |
| Idle power | 3–5W | 8–12W |
| Container images | ARM64 — most exist now, some don't | Everything, always |
The kit pricing is the part Pi advocates skip. The $80 board needs the official 27W PSU (~$12), a case with cooling (~$10–15), and storage — either a microSD that will eventually corrupt under database write loads, or an NVMe HAT plus drive (~$35) that pushes the total past the ThinkCentre. Off-lease corporate minis (M720q/M920q, Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP EliteDesk Mini, 8th-gen Intel or newer) exist in enormous supply because businesses replaced them in waves; eBay has thousands on any given day.
Electricity: the Pi's win is $8 a year
The gap that sounds decisive — 4W versus 10W — is 53 kWh per year, which at the US average of ~$0.15/kWh comes to about $8, or roughly €16 at European rates near €0.30/kWh. Against a 3× performance gap and double the RAM, that's noise. Even over a five-year service life the Pi's power saving never repays what you gave up in capability, and the full homelab electricity math shows idle watts only start dominating decisions when you're comparing against 100W+ enterprise gear, not between two single-digit-watt boxes.
Where the mini PC actually earns it
Transcoding. QuickSync on the UHD 630 handles three or four simultaneous 1080p transcodes, plus tone-mapped 4K-to-1080p, at a few watts. The Pi 5 dropped hardware encoding entirely — every Jellyfin transcode is software, and one stream pins the CPU. If a media server is anywhere in your plans, this alone decides it.
Databases on real storage. Immich, Nextcloud, and anything else with Postgres writes constantly. On microSD that's a corruption countdown; on the ThinkCentre's NVMe it's a non-event. The Pi needs the NVMe HAT to compete, which costs money and its single PCIe 2.0 lane still caps around 400MB/s.
Compatibility without asterisks. ARM64 coverage is genuinely good in 2026 — the major projects all publish multi-arch images — but the long tail still bites: niche tools, older images, prebuilt binaries in Dockerfiles. On x86 the failure mode simply doesn't exist, and you stop reading "Exec format error" forums entirely.
Headroom. 16GB upgradeable to 32GB means the box survives your ambitions. The 8GB soldered ceiling on the Pi is exactly where a homelab sits after year one, and the platform power is paid once — adding the tenth container costs the mini PC nothing, while the Pi that's out of RAM needs a second Pi, which doubles everything including the power argument it was supposed to be winning.
Where the Pi still wins
GPIO and HATs, with no equivalent on any x86 mini: if the project involves sensors, relays, PoE, or a camera module, it's a Pi project. Guaranteed fanless silence for a bedroom shelf. DC input, which makes solar or battery-backed deployments simple, and a PoE HAT that gets power and network down one cable to wherever the switch reaches. New-with-warranty availability, versus used-market lottery. And it remains the perfect dedicated appliance: a Pi-hole or Home Assistant box that does one job, sits by the router, and survives your main server's experiments — there's a real argument for keeping DNS off the machine you tinker with, as anyone who has taken down the family's internet mid-rebuild can confirm.
Buying the mini PC without getting burned
Search for M720q, M920q, OptiPlex 3060–7080 Micro, or EliteDesk 800 G4/G5 Mini. Treat 8th-gen Intel (8500T-class) as the floor: it's where QuickSync got good and where the used supply is deepest, at $80–150 depending on RAM. Check the listing includes the external PSU (a missing proprietary brick costs $15–20), prefer 16GB configurations since seller RAM is cheaper than retail, and expect to replace the CMOS battery on anything five years old — a $2 part that presents as spooky boot failures. Listings under $100 usually mean 8GB and no SSD; price the upgrades before calling it a bargain. The same logic scales up; the off-lease hardware field guide covers the bigger boxes.
What I'd do
Buy the used mini PC as the homelab's centre of gravity — the extra $0–30 over a Pi kit buys triple the compute, double the RAM, real storage, and QuickSync. Follow the first-server path on it without modification. Then, if and when a genuinely appliance-shaped job appears — network-wide DNS, a sensor project, something that must be silent and tiny — buy a Pi for that job and let it do nothing else. One strong generalist plus small dedicated appliances beats a cluster of underpowered boards on every axis I've found, including the fun one.