2026-08-27

The Raspberry Pi 5 with a case, PSU, and SD card easily clears £80. Meanwhile, refurbished mini PCs — think HP EliteDesk 800 G3 or Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny units — regularly appear on eBay and Amazon for £60–£90 with an Intel i5, 8 GB RAM, and an NVMe slot already built in.

XDA's latest piece lays out the argument clearly: for most homelab tasks — Docker hosts, Proxmox nodes, Home Assistant, media servers — x86 compatibility and more headroom make refurb minis the smarter buy.

The advantages stack up fast. You get SATA and NVMe storage options (no messing with microSD reliability), dual-channel DDR4 that's cheap to upgrade, and hardware transcoding via Intel Quick Sync. Most run silently at idle and sip 10–15W under light load, which isn't far off a Pi 5.

Honest caveats. Pis still win where GPIO and ultra-low power matter — think Zigbee coordinators, PoE-powered sensors, or anything truly embedded. ARM software support in the Pi ecosystem is also excellent for specific use cases like PiKVM. And with refurbs you're always rolling the dice slightly on remaining lifespan, so stick to sellers with decent return policies.

The sweet spot right now in the UK is the HP ProDesk/EliteDesk 600–800 G2/G3 Micro range. Search HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini refurbished — units with an i5-6500T or i5-7500T are plentiful under £80.

If you do pick one up, you'll likely want to add an NVMe drive. Our M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure – USB-C 10Gbps with Magnetic Closure is handy for cloning or prepping drives before slotting them in, and a 240W USB-C Fast-Charging & Data Cable – Braided, LED Indicator keeps your bench tidy while you're at it.

Bottom line: before you click "add to basket" on another Pi, check refurb mini PC prices first. In 2025, the value gap has closed — and for most homelab workloads, x86 simply does more.