I bought what was basically a locked-down Chromebox for “$25”… which turned into about $37 after shipping and taxes, and I was honestly not expecting much. But this Acer CXi3 (8th gen i3-8130U, 8GB DDR4, 64GB SSD) ended up being a ridiculously capable little box once I got it recovered, de-managed, and then flashed with MrChromebox’s full ROM UEFI firmware. That’s the big theme of this video: taking something that’s designed to only boot ChromeOS and turning it into a normal UEFI mini PC that can run whatever you want. I walk through the risky part (disabling firmware write protection and flashing full ROM), then I actually put it to work. I swapped in a 1TB NVMe drive, installed Proxmox, and after PowerTOP autotune plus an AutoASPM script, I saw an insane ~1.5W idle (it crept closer to ~2W once I disabled Energy Efficient Ethernet to fix slow downloads on Linux). From there I tested real homelab stuff: a Minecraft server via Crafty Controller, Jellyfin with Intel Quick Sync transcoding, and even a “worst case” Windows setup for benchmarks and Moonlight remote gaming. The takeaway is simple: for cheap, low-power, lightweight services like Home Assistant, Pi-hole, and Uptime Kuma, this hacked Chromebox is shockingly impressive—just don’t ignore the risk of bricking it.