If you’ve watched my channel for any amount of time, you know I’m a big fan of these tiny mini/micro PCs—especially for cheap homelab duty. In this video I picked up a Lenovo M72p Tiny (Ivy Bridge i5-3470T, DDR3 SODIMM, SATA only) to answer a simple question: how old is too old… and why are people still buying these when they’re barely cheaper than newer boxes? I started with basic desktop testing in Windows 10 and, honestly, it’s still pretty snappy for web browsing and general app use thanks to decent single‑thread performance. But the age shows fast: the HD 2500 iGPU struggles with modern video (no VP9 decode, limited outputs), and the thermal design is just weird—under load it ran hot, got noisy, and even after a clean + new paste it still flirted with 90°C and throttling. Then I moved it into “home server” mode with Proxmox. I booted from an NVMe drive through the mini‑PCIe slot using adapters and Clover, ran HAOS, Jellyfin, and Crafty, and even got idle power down to about 9W headless. AMT remote management was a genuinely nice surprise. The takeaway: it can still be useful if it falls into your lap cheap, but at today’s used prices there’s basically no reason to buy one over a 6th/7th gen Intel or a Ryzen tiny.