It started, as these things do, with a single innocent question: “Is this computer any good for running Home Assistant?”
A used HP EliteDesk for 168 francs. A reasonable machine. I could have bought it that afternoon and been running Home Assistant by dinner. Instead, I went down a rabbit hole so deep I came out the other side with a different philosophy about buying hardware entirely — and a returned package on my conscience.
If you’re standing at the trailhead of your own home-server journey, maybe my detour can save you a few wrong turns. Or at least make you feel better about your own.
The spec spiral
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you start shopping for a Home Assistant box: almost anything works.
Home Assistant Operating System, running bare metal, uses something like 2 GB of RAM and a rounding error’s worth of CPU. A Raspberry Pi handles it. A decade-old office PC handles it with contempt. The “requirements” are so modest that the entire premise of comparison shopping starts to wobble the moment you look at it honestly.
I did not look at it honestly. Not for a while.
Instead, I compared. An i5-7500 against an i7-6700T. A 6500T against a 7500T. Then the 8th-gen chips — 8500T, 8600T, 8700T. Then 9th gen, 10th gen. I learned the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit HEVC hardware decoding (it matters if you’ll run modern 4K cameras through Frigate, and not otherwise). I learned that the “T” suffix means a 35-watt low-power variant designed for exactly this kind of always-on, quiet, tucked-in-a-closet duty. I learned that hyperthreading helps if you’ll run a dozen containers and does precisely nothing if you won’t.
Every comparison taught me something. That was the trap. Each new listing produced a little hit of “ah, now I understand this better” — even as the decision drifted further away and the actual quality difference between options shrank toward zero.
By machine number eight, I was agonizing over chips that were all five to ten times more powerful than my workload would ever need. I was optimizing a variable that didn’t matter, with the conviction of someone who believed it did.
The pivot that should have come first
The most useful moment in the whole journey wasn’t a hardware comparison at all. It was finally asking the right question: what am I actually going to run on this thing?
Two architectures were on the table:
HAOS bare metal — install Home Assistant Operating System directly on the machine. It becomes an appliance. One job, done well, near-zero maintenance. Boring in the best way.
Proxmox — install a hypervisor first, then run Home Assistant in a virtual machine alongside other services. Infinitely flexible, a genuine homelab, and a real time commitment to set up and maintain.
I went back and forth, but the honest answer was: I wanted home automation to just work. I wasn’t planning a media server empire. I didn’t need to run a dozen VMs. I wanted lights, sensors, maybe some cameras later, and a system I wouldn’t have to babysit.
That decision — HAOS bare metal — should have ended the hardware debate immediately. It meant I needed almost nothing. Any four-core machine with 16 GB of RAM and modern-ish video decoding would do, with room to spare for adding Frigate and a few cameras down the line.
I had my answer. I kept shopping anyway.
The modern temptation
The deeper I went, the more I drifted from the original “boring old business PC” idea toward shiny new mini PCs. The N100 era of tiny, efficient, modern little boxes is genuinely tempting: 6-watt power draw, the latest video codecs including AV1, brand-new condition, and prices that undercut the used enterprise gear.
I found one. An Acemagic N100 — 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, dual gigabit LAN, an internal bay for adding a hard drive (the holy grail for Frigate recordings, since most mini PCs lack it), and a near-new condition. I talked the price down to 180 euros. I bought it.
For about a day, I felt like I’d won. Modern platform, low power, more features than the old HP boxes, at a great price. The spec-sheet maximizer in me was satisfied.
The return
Then the other shoe dropped — and it wasn’t about specs at all.
These ultra-cheap mini PCs almost all come from a handful of Chinese ODMs, and the category has a track record problem. One of them — Acemagic, specifically — was caught in early 2024 shipping units with malware pre-installed in the Windows image. The company owned up to it and patched their process, and there’s been no repeat since. Technically, since I was going to wipe Windows and install HAOS anyway, the original image was irrelevant. I’d never run their Windows.
But the more I sat with it, the more it bothered me. This was going to be the machine at the center of my home — connected to my network, watching my sensors, eventually handling cameras. A device whose entire job is to be trusted, sitting on my LAN 24/7, for years. “The pre-installed malware doesn’t matter because I’m wiping it” is true at the OS level, but it didn’t answer the deeper unease: do I trust the supply chain of the thing I’m putting at the heart of my home?
Firmware-level concerns don’t get wiped by reinstalling the operating system. And the whole point of a home automation hub — especially one that might one day see camera feeds — is that it should be the last device on your network you have to worry about eavesdropping on you.
So I returned it.
Trust over specs
I went back to the boring choice. A used HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Desktop Mini — Intel i5-8600T, six cores, 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD, condition “Sehr Gut.” 236 euros. More expensive than the Acemagic. Slightly older. Higher power draw. On a pure spec-sheet, a worse deal.
On the metric I’d finally decided actually mattered — trust — it was the clear winner.
This is enterprise hardware from a vendor with a thirty-year track record, built to sit in corporate environments where security and supply-chain integrity are contractual obligations, not afterthoughts. HP publishes BIOS updates for these machines years into their life. The first thing I did when it arrived was flash the latest firmware (February 2026) — closing known vulnerabilities, starting from a clean, vendor-signed baseline.
A six-core business PC running current firmware from a major manufacturer, with HAOS bare metal on top, is about as boring and trustworthy a foundation as you can build a smart home on. And boring and trustworthy, it turns out, is exactly what I wanted all along. I just took the scenic route to figure it out.
What I’d tell my past self
Three things, if I could go back to that first innocent question:
Decide what you’re running before you compare hardware. The “HAOS bare metal vs. Proxmox” question determines everything downstream. I had it backwards — I compared chips for weeks before settling the architecture that made 90% of those comparisons irrelevant.
Set your stopping criteria up front. “I’ll buy the first machine with ≥4 cores, 16 GB RAM, an internal drive bay, under €250, from a vendor I trust.” Any of several machines would have triggered an instant purchase, and I’d have stopped at the first match instead of touring the entire used-PC market. This turns you from an exhausting maximizer into a satisficer with high standards — same decision quality, a fraction of the agony.
For the device at the center of your home, trust is a spec. It doesn’t show up on the comparison table next to clock speed and core count, but it should. The cheapest box with the best numbers is not the best choice if you can’t trust what’s underneath the operating system. A slightly slower, slightly pricier machine from a vendor with real accountability and firmware support can be the smarter buy — especially for something that lives on your network, watches your home, and runs for years.
I spent weeks and circled back to almost exactly where I started — a used HP business PC at a sensible price. But I didn’t end up in the same place I’d have landed on day one. I ended up there knowing why, having ruled out the alternatives myself, and having reframed the entire decision around the thing that actually mattered.
The journey was longer than the decision required. But the destination is one I’ll trust for years. And honestly? I enjoyed the hike.
Now, if you’ll excuse me — I have a house to make smart.