Which mini-PC should you buy for a low-power homelab?

TDP is a thermal-design rating for cooling, not a power-draw figure — a 35 W-TDP 'T' chip and a 65 W-TDP desktop chip in the same chassis can idle 11 W vs 18 W. For an always-on box, every watt of idle is roughly $1/year (US) or $2.50/year (EU). The deciding number is the wall-measured idle draw, which manufacturers never publish. Every idle figure here is wall-measured and cited.

The i225-V has a documented random-dropout bug that takes a headless box offline until a hard reset. The i226-V contains the fixes and is the chipset to want. Many cheap mini-PCs ship Realtek RTL8125 (works on Proxmox/Linux, occasional dropouts; not supported on VMware ESXi). The NIC silicon is rarely on the spec sheet — confirm with lspci -nn on the unit you receive.

Almost none of the consumer N100/Ryzen mini-PCs do. AMD Ryzen PRO APUs (e.g. Lenovo M75q) are the usual 'maybe' — ServeTheHome says ECC is supported on the M75q Gen2, but the community never validated a specific working ECC SODIMM, so we mark it unverified. If you genuinely need ECC, a Xeon-E tower (or a board with validated ECC) is the honest answer — at ~10× the idle power.

On the MS-01 the Iris Xe iGPU exposes multiple functions and full passthrough is notoriously fiddly — SR-IOV vGPU is the reliable route for Plex/Jellyfin transcode. AMD APUs hit the AMD reset bug: the GPU works on first VM boot but won't reset on restart until the host reboots, unless you install gnif's vendor-reset module (and even that doesn't cover every APU).