Honestly, I'm a big supporter of refurbishing old computers. Admittedly I have 2 usff(1 liter) pc's which I got for less than 100 bucks with some minor upgrades

Honestly, I'm a big supporter of refurbishing old computers. Admittedly I have 2 usff(1 liter) pc's which I got for less than 100 bucks with some minor upgrades thrown in there(a bit more ram and hard drive) - a Dell Optiplex and a Lenovo thinkcenter. With a quad core, 6-th gen i5, those two are stupid powerful for self-hosting and homelab purposes. At this point, I'd take one of those over an SBC any day of the week. Take the one that uses most resources: it's on 24/7 and has been doing an insane amount of work without batting an eye. It's been processing gigabytes of data daily and running 3 ML models for over 8 months and has been helping with what would otherwise be a very time consuming and difficult task. Refurbishing old PC's is really a goldmine in the homelab/automation/hacking spaces.