[cr3ative]

Agree with this article - those little Prodesks are available very cheap and with some impressive configurations for power vs. strength.

I have an i3-8100T version which includes on-cpu video encoding, ideal for Plex. Runs unRAID. Replaced a much larger system which took much more power.

[accrual]

This is what I do. Small form factor PCs meant to sit behind monitors are plenty powerful for many homelab tasks. I divide mine up into multiple VMs and have CPU, memory, and disk to spare for whenever I want to spin up something new.