The perfect little machine for a Home lab with some services like nginx, ollama, n8n, openclaw, open WebUI, pihole, home assistant and other toys. Got it on January 11th, 2024. It was first intended to replace my old HP Z600 Workstation from 2018. 6 years is a good time. And the Z600 died soon after, at least the PSU. But we “resurrected” it 2026!
Setup
2024-01-11
4,500,000 VND for i5-8500T 6 core with 32GB DDR4 RAM and 512 GB NVMe 2024-01-11 with offer link , but this link does not work anymore in early 2026. Seller is Shop May tinh vs linh kien on chotot: link Seller is Nhật Phát, or link 2 , Địa chỉ giao dịch: 49/10 Phạm Văn Bạch, P15, Tân bình, HCM. (Phường Tân Sơn, TP Hồ Chí Minh mới). He still sells this machine two years later, but now for 4,600,000 VND. Shouldn’t used computers get cheaper?
- 3,400,000 VND for i5 8500T 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe
- 16 GB +300,000 VND 8gb ddr4
- 32GB + 600,000 VND 16gb ddr4
- 512GB SSD (650,000 VND if you buy there) + 300,000 VND
- 3.4 + 0.3 + 0.6 + 0.3 = 4.6 but with discount just 4,500,000 VND - 184 USD/168 Euro
It only needs 4.9 Watt with powertop –auto-tune and Ubuntu.
Little did I know that even though the memory bandwidth is not the best with scoring RAM prices at the end of 2025 this 32 GB machine could slowly, but steady actually run some agentic LLMs.
2025-02-05
I give it to Moises on February 5th, 2025. It’s mainly used for YouTube to drive the 55” 4K monitor Ad-free with the Brave browser. But after TET 2026 I think I need it back.
2026-02-09
Well, I gave it to Moises on February 5th, 2025. It’s mainly used for YouTube to drive the 55” 4K monitor Ad-free with the Brave browser. But after TET 2026 I think I need it back.
Remembering some older machines, I restarted one of the Tanix TX mini and Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM and Raspberry Pi 3 with 1 GB RAM.
2026-03-23 Dedicated OpenClaw Network
For my IOT network I have a TP-Link WR1043ND running on OpenWRT (see TP-Link WR1043ND v3 - WIFI4) but with only 64 MB RAM this router is almost at the limit of its capabilities. So I got another Archer C7 with twice the RAM and Flash and installed a new OpenWRT 25.12.1 on it. It has enough headroom for future projects. See Router.