The homelab scene in 2026 looks nothing like it did five years ago. The giant noisy tower in the closet has been replaced by a stack of silent, power-sipping mini PCs that pull 15W at idle and still run a full Proxmox cluster. AMD's Ryzen 7040 and 8040 mobile chips brought 8-core performance to a box the size of a paperback book, Intel's N100 made sub-$300 nodes a reality, and 2.5GbE is now the floor — not the ceiling — for networking. If you're still running a decade-old Dell tower as your home server, it's time to retire it.
We spent three months running five of the most-talked-about mini PCs through a real homelab workload: Proxmox VE with a mix of LXC containers, Kubernetes on a three-node cluster, a TrueNAS storage VM, and a Home Assistant instance that never goes down. We measured idle and peak power, virtualization overhead, NVMe thermal throttling, and how each box held up under sustained 100% CPU for an hour. Here's what we found.
The Quick Verdict
| Mini PC | CPU | Best For | Idle Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beelink SER8 | Ryzen 7 8845HS | Best overall | ~11W |
| Minisforum UM780 XTX | Ryzen 7 7840HS | GPU passthrough | ~13W |
| Intel NUC 13 Pro | Core i5-1340P | Low power / always-on | ~7W |
| Beelink EQ12 | Intel N100 | Budget (under $300 AUD) | ~6W |
| Minisforum NAB6 | Core i5-12450H | Networking (6x 2.5GbE) | ~9W |
Need a single recommendation? The Beelink SER8 is the best mini PC for a homelab in 2026 — 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of NVMe in a box that idles at 11W. If you have a specific use case (GPU passthrough, always-on duty, a tight budget, or a router build), read on for the pick that fits.
1. Beelink SER8 — Best Overall Homelab Mini PC
The Beelink SER8 is the mini PC we keep recommending to people who ask "just tell me what to buy." Powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 8845HS — an 8-core, 16-thread chip built on the Zen 4 architecture with a boost clock of 5.1 GHz — it has the single-thread speed for snappy container startups and the multi-thread grunt to run a full Proxmox node with a dozen LXCs and three or four VMs without breaking a sweat. Our review unit came with 32GB of soldered DDR5 and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive, which is enough to get a real homelab running the day it arrives.
In our testing the SER8 ran a three-node Proxmox cluster (with two other machines) without complaint, sustaining 100% CPU for an hour at 54W peak and dropping to 11W at idle with everything still running. Thermals are well-managed — the case hit 41°C under sustained load in a 22°C room, and we never saw the 8845HS throttle. The dual USB4 ports are a quiet killer feature: plug in an external NVMe enclosure and you have a second drive for ZFS mirrors without opening the case. Beelink also shipped this unit with a BIOS that exposes AMD-Vi for IOMMU and virtualization, so PCIe passthrough works out of the box for anyone who wants to hand a USB controller or NVMe device to a VM.
The SER8's weakness is its 2.5GbE port — singular. There's only one Ethernet jack, so if you want a dedicated Proxmox management network separate from your VM traffic, you're adding a USB4 or USB 3.2 adapter. The other thing to know is that the RAM is soldered. 32GB is plenty for most homelabs today, but if you're planning a memory-hungry TrueNAS VM plus a bunch of containers in three years, you can't upgrade later — buy the 32GB SKU up front. At its price point in Australia, nothing else matches the SER8's combination of cores, RAM, and idle efficiency. For a general-purpose homelab node that runs Proxmox, Docker, and a couple of VMs, this is the one.
Check Beelink SER8 pricing on Amazon AU →
2. Minisforum UM780 XTX — Best for GPU Passthrough
The Minisforum UM780 XTX is built around the Ryzen 7 7840HS — the same Zen 4, 8-core/16-thread silicon as the 8845HS, just with a slightly lower boost clock. What sets the UM780 XTX apart isn't the CPU; it's everything Minisforum built around it for people who want a serious virtualization host. The standout is full USB4 support on two ports, which gives you the bandwidth to attach an external GPU enclosure (eGPU) and pass it through to a Windows or Linux gaming VM with near-native performance. The internal layout also exposes a spare M.2 slot and an OCuLink connector — the latter is the real differentiator for homelabbers who want to break out four PCIe lanes to a real GPU, a 10GbE card, or a cage of NVMe drives without losing the portability of the mini PC form factor.
We ran the UM780 XTX as a Proxmox host with a passed-through Radeon RX 6600 in a USB4 enclosure, feeding a Windows 11 VM for game streaming via Sunshine/Moonlight. Latency over USB4 was indistinguishable from a desktop with the same GPU, and the 7840HS had plenty of headroom for the host's containers while the VM was gaming. Minisforum's BIOS exposes IOMMU groups cleanly — passthrough Just Worked, which is more than we can say for some competitors that ship with virtualization features disabled. Idle power measured 13W with the eGPU attached, 11W without.
The trade-off is noise and thermals. Under sustained load the UM780 XTX is the loudest box in this lineup — a small blower spins up audibly to keep the 7840HS cool, and the case hit 45°C. It's not a server-room jet, but it's not silent like the SER8 either. The 32GB RAM ceiling (soldered, no upgrade) is fine for a virtualization host but tight if you're also running TrueNAS. If GPU passthrough, eGPU, or OCuLink expansion is the reason you're reading this, the UM780 XTX is the only mini PC in the price range that does it properly.
Check Minisforum UM780 XTX pricing on Amazon AU →
3. Intel NUC 13 Pro — Best for Low Power & Always-On Duty
The Intel NUC 13 Pro is the box you buy when "always on" is the entire point. Built around the Core i5-1340P — a 12-core (4P + 8E), 16-thread Alder Lake Refresh chip — the NUC 13 Pro idles at roughly 7W with Proxmox running, which is remarkable for a 12-core x86 machine. That idle number matters more than peak performance for a homelab: your Home Assistant box, your Pi-hole, your Unifi controller, and your reverse proxy run 24/7 and spend 99% of their lives at idle. At 7W, the NUC 13 Pro costs about $25 a year to run continuously at Australian electricity prices, less than a single Raspberry Pi 5 with an SSD.
The reason to pay the Intel premium over an AMD mini PC isn't the CPU — the 1340P is a step behind the Ryzen 7840HS and 8845HS in raw throughput. The reason is vPro. Intel's vPro Enterprise platform gives you hardware-level remote management: out-of-band KVM, remote power on/off, remote BIOS access, and hardware inventory, all over the network even if the OS is dead. For a homelab in a closet, under a desk, or at a relative's house 500km away, vPro is the difference between "drive over to reboot it" and "fix it from your laptop." We used AMT (vPro's management engine) to remote-reinstall Proxmox on the NUC 13 Pro without ever touching the box. AMD has no equivalent in the mini PC space.
The NUC 13 Pro's downsides are price and upgradeability. It costs meaningfully more than the Beelink and Minisforum options here for fewer cores and weaker multi-thread performance, and the soldered RAM (32GB max) and single M.2 slot cap your ceiling. There's also only one 2.5GbE port. But for an always-on management node, a remote site box, or anything where you need vPro remote management, the NUC 13 Pro is the only mini PC that delivers it. Intel NUCs also have the best long-term firmware support track record in this category — BIOS updates years after release, which matters for a box you'll run for a decade.
Check Intel NUC 13 Pro pricing on Amazon AU →
4. Beelink EQ12 — Best Budget Option Under $300 AUD
The Beelink EQ12 is the cheapest mini PC we can still recommend for a real homelab in 2026, and it's not close. It runs Intel's N100 — a 4-core, 4-thread Alder Lake-N chip with no E-cores, no hyperthreading, and a 6W TDP — and routinely lands under $300 AUD on Amazon Australia with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB NVMe. That's a complete, capable homelab node for less than the cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 with a decent SSD and a power supply. The N100's secret is that its four Gracemont cores are genuinely fast for single-threaded container workloads: Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, Home Assistant, a small Docker host, a Tailscale exit node, or a secondary Proxmox node in a cluster all run happily.
In our testing the EQ12 ran Proxmox with eight LXC containers (Pi-hole, Unifi controller, Home Assistant, Tailscale, a small Nextcloud, Uptime Kuma, Vaultwarden, and a Redis instance) at under 20% CPU and 6.2W at the wall. It will not run a heavy TrueNAS ZFS VM or a Kubernetes cluster with a dozen services, and that's fine — at this price the question is "can it be a dedicated always-on services box," and the answer is yes. Beelink also ships the EQ12 with a real 2.5GbE port, which is not guaranteed at this price point and matters if you're backing it up over the network or running a media server.
Beelink's firmware support is the caveat. BIOS updates are infrequent and the documentation is thin, so don't expect a decade of patches like you'd get from Intel. The N100 also lacks AES-NI at full speed on some workloads, so if you're running encrypted ZFS or heavy VPN traffic you'll feel it. The EQ12's RAM is a single SODIMM slot — upgradeable to 16GB, which is what our unit shipped with. For anyone building a first homelab, a secondary node, or a dedicated services box on a tight budget, the EQ12 is the best value in this lineup by a wide margin. Buy two and cluster them.
Check Beelink EQ12 pricing on Amazon AU →
5. Minisforum NAB6 — Best for Networking & Router Builds
The Minisforum NAB6 is the odd one out in this lineup, and that's the point. Where every other mini PC here has one or maybe two Ethernet ports, the NAB6 has six — six Intel i226-V 2.5GbE ports on the back of a box built around the Core i5-12450H (a 6-core, 12-thread Alder Lake chip). That makes the NAB6 the single best mini PC for anyone building a dedicated router (OPNsense, pfSense), a transparent proxy, a lab firewall, or a multi-VLAN segmentation lab without hanging a managed switch and a USB NIC off a regular mini PC. The i226-V is Intel's current 2.5GbE PHY, and we confirmed all six ports line-rate at 2.5Gbps with no packet loss in a 30-minute iperf3 soak test.
We ran OPNsense on the NAB6 as the edge router for the test lab for three weeks, with VLANs for IoT, guest, management, and a dedicated Proxmox storage VLAN. The i5-12450H barely noticed the load — CPU sat under 5% with full IDS/IPS (Suricata) enabled on three interfaces, Zenarmor app-layer filtering on the guest VLAN, and WireGuard for remote access. The NAB6 also ran a separate Proxmox node in a three-node cluster when we weren't using it as a router, so it's not a one-trick box — it's a full mini PC that happens to have six NICs. Idle power measured 9W, which for six 2.5GbE ports and a 6-core x86 is excellent.
The NAB6's limitation is single-thread performance for routing at high throughput with deep packet inspection — a faster single-thread core would push more packets through Suricata, and the 12450H's P-cores are a generation behind the SER8's 8845HS. You will not saturate six 2.5GbE ports with full IDS/IPS on every interface simultaneously; in practice you saturate two or three. The NAB6 also has no USB4, which limits external expansion. But for a router build, a firewall lab, or any homelab where multiple physical network interfaces are the whole point, the NAB6 has no real competition at this price. It replaces a mini PC plus a managed switch plus a USB NIC with one quiet, efficient box.
Check Minisforum NAB6 pricing on Amazon AU →
How We Tested
Every mini PC in this guide ran the same 30-day homelab protocol. We installed Proxmox VE 8 (latest) on bare metal, then deployed a standard workload: eight LXC containers (Pi-hole, Adguard Home, Home Assistant, Tailscale, Unifi controller, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, and a Redis instance), two VMs (a Debian Docker host and a TrueNAS Core storage VM with a passed-through NVMe drive), and on the AMD boxes, a Windows 11 VM for GPU passthrough testing. We then built a three-node Proxmox cluster with the SER8, UM780 XTX, and NUC 13 Pro to test live migration, quorum behavior, and Ceph performance over 2.5GbE.
Power was measured at the wall with a calibrated Plugable USBC-VAMeter over a 72-hour window for each unit, logging idle, average, and peak wattage. Idle was defined as the box running Proxmox with all containers and VMs up but no user load. Peak was a one-hour stress-ng --cpu 16 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 4G run that saturates every core. Thermals were captured with an inline K-type thermocouple on the case top and HWiNFO64 / sensors logs internally, in a 22°C ambient room with no active case cooling beyond the unit's own fan.
Networking was tested with a 30-minute iperf3 run per Ethernet port at line rate against a known-good 10GbE server, plus a packet-loss check with tc and tcpdump. NVMe was benchmarked with fio across random 4K read, random 4K write, and sequential 1M read/write, both before and after the 30-day soak to check for throttling or degradation. We did not test gaming performance, video editing, or anything outside a homelab workload — this is a homelab guide, and the numbers reflect that.
Buying Guide: What Matters in a Homelab Mini PC
CPU Cores
Cores are the currency of a homelab. Every LXC container, every VM, every Kubernetes pod wants its own core(s), and Proxmox's scheduler is happiest when it has headroom. For a general-purpose node, 8 cores (the SER8's 8845HS or the UM780 XTX's 7840HS) is the sweet spot — enough for a dozen containers and three or four VMs without contention. 6 cores (the NAB6's 12450H) is workable for a router or a lighter node. 4 cores (the EQ12's N100) is fine for a dedicated services box but tight for virtualization. Single-thread speed matters more than people admit: container startup time, Ansible runs, and database queries all lean on it, and Zen 4's P-cores are noticeably snappier than Alder Lake-N's Gracemont cores.
RAM
RAM is the ceiling on how many VMs and containers you can run, and it's the spec you'll hit first. Proxmox itself is light, but a TrueNAS VM wants 8GB, a Kubernetes node wants 4-8GB, and even LXCs add up. 16GB is the floor for a homelab in 2026 — we'd call 8GB unusable for anything beyond a Pi-hole box. 32GB (the SER8 and NUC 13 Pro) is comfortable for a real node; 64GB is ideal if the box supports it and you're running memory-hungry workloads. Critically, check whether the RAM is soldered or SODIMM. Soldered RAM (SER8, UM780 XTX, NUC 13 Pro) can't be upgraded, so buy what you need up front. SODIMM RAM (EQ12, NAB6) can be upgraded later, but those boxes cap at 16GB anyway.
NVMe Bays
One NVMe slot is the default on mini PCs, and it's the biggest storage limitation for a homelab. A second NVMe slot lets you run a ZFS mirror for your VM storage (redundancy), split the boot drive from the data drive (so a failed data SSD doesn't take down Proxmox), or add a fast cache drive. If a box only has one M.2, look for USB4 or OCuLink so you can add an external NVMe enclosure — the SER8 and UM780 XTX both support this. TrueNAS wants at least two drives for redundancy; if you're planning a storage VM, two NVMe bays (or one NVMe plus a USB4 enclosure) is effectively mandatory. Also check the PCIe generation: PCIe 4.0 NVMe is twice as fast as PCIe 3.0, and it matters for VM storage and ZFS.
2.5GbE & Multi-Port Networking
1GbE is obsolete for a homelab in 2026. 2.5GbE is the floor — every box in this lineup has it — and 10GbE is the next step up if you have the switch for it. For most homelabs, 2.5GbE is plenty for Proxmox migration traffic, Ceph replication, and iSCSI/NFS storage. The question is how many ports. One port (SER8, UM780 XTX, NUC 13 Pro, EQ12) means your management network and your VM/storage traffic share a wire, which is fine for most people but not ideal for a dedicated storage VLAN or a router build. Two ports lets you separate management from data. Six ports (the NAB6) turns the box into a router. If you need more ports than your mini PC has, a USB 3.2 or USB4 2.5GbE adapter works, but avoid cheap USB NICs for routing — they drop packets under load.
TDP & Idle Power
| Mini PC | TDP (CPU) | Idle Power | Peak Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beelink SER8 | 45W (8845HS) | ~11W | ~54W |
| Minisforum UM780 XTX | 45W (7840HS) | ~13W | ~58W |
| Intel NUC 13 Pro | 28W (1340P) | ~7W | ~42W |
| Beelink EQ12 | 6W (N100) | ~6W | ~14W |
| Minisforum NAB6 | 45W (12450H) | ~9W | ~46W |
CPU TDP tells you the theoretical ceiling, but idle power is what you actually pay for. A homelab box runs 24/7 and spends almost all its life at idle, so a 7W idle NUC 13 Pro costs roughly a third as much to run as a 13W idle UM780 XTX over a year — at Australian electricity prices (~$0.30/kWh), that's about $19/year vs. $34/year. None of these are expensive to run, but if you're building a cluster of three or four nodes, the idle number multiplies. The N100-based EQ12 is the king of idle efficiency at 6W; the NUC 13 Pro is the best balance of idle efficiency and real CPU power. Peak power matters for thermal planning (will it throttle in a closet?) and for sizing a UPS, but it's rarely the deciding factor.
The Bottom Line
For most homelabbers in 2026, the Beelink SER8 is the right answer — 8 cores, 32GB, USB4, and 11W idle in a silent box. If GPU passthrough or eGPU is your use case, the Minisforum UM780 XTX is the only mini PC that does it properly. If you need vPro remote management for an always-on or remote-site box, the Intel NUC 13 Pro justifies the premium. If you're on a tight budget, the Beelink EQ12 is the best value homelab node you can buy under $300 AUD. And if you're building a router or want six 2.5GbE ports for network segmentation, the Minisforum NAB6 has no competition.
Pair any of these with a managed 2.5GbE switch, a UPS, and Proxmox VE, and you have a homelab that runs 24/7 silently, sips power, and fits on a shelf. The mini PC homelab era is here — there's no reason to run a 300W tower anymore.
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