homelab

I decided to go with Tiny/Mini/Micros personally. It consumes more than a Pi but it's also more powerful. I can find second-hand TMMs locally with 8th gen Intel i5 for almost the same price as a Pi kit (Some Single Board Computers looks affordable, but you often need to add storage, a power brick, an enclosure, which can add up quickly!)

I use TMMs with a mix of 6th-gen and 8th-gen Intel i5. The 6th gen are decent for my needs, but the >7th-gen's iGPU supports more codecs, which is useful if you want to stream HEVC. i5-8500T also have 2 more cores than i5-6500T!

Edit: those TMMs are used in a lot of businesses and often replaced every 3-4 years. They may be slightly more power hundry than newer hardware, but I like to think I am saving them from being e-waste!

What do you intend to use it for? I replaced my ryzen box with an OrangePi5 for power consumption reasons. Obviously the performance is not even close but turns out it was enough for Jellyfin, torrenting, pihole, and a Minecraft server.

Go on ebay and look at used at used USSF, 1 liter PCs (see https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/).

Depending on what you need to do, thin clients may also be a great fit.

Keep tabs on https://rpilocator.com/ to check stock of Pi retailers around the globe.

Unless you need gpio pins, or an x86 architecture, get whatever is cheaper.

Things to keep in mind. Nuc's tend to use special power adaptors, but have more raw horsepower. Pi's can be driven via PoE. I have both and use both for different things.