Cheapest Mini PCs Worth Buying in 2026

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The cheapest Mini PCs can cost surprisingly little (often $100 to $220) and still make useful, quiet, low-power computers. At the very bottom of the market you may see older Intel Atom or Celeron chips and refurbished enterprise micro desktops (like Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk Mini, and Dell OptiPlex Micro). Newer Intel N-series processors — such as the N95, N97, N100, and N150 — are generally the best buys when the price difference is small.

What Can A Cheap Mini PC Do?

A budget Mini PC is a great fit for lightweight jobs that do not need heavy CPU power. It can run Pi-hole or AdGuard Home to block ads across your network, connect to and manage a 3D printer with OctoPrint or Klipper, host Home Assistant, act as a simple NAS file server, run a few Docker containers, or power a basic web-browsing and document workstation.

These machines are also popular as thin clients, classic 2D retro-emulation boxes, digital-signage players, and inexpensive Linux boxes for learning.

Know When To Spend More

An older Atom or Celeron processor will struggle with heavy multitasking, modern 3D games, virtual machines, and 4K video transcoding. If you want a media server that transcodes 4K streams, step up to an Intel N95/N100/N150 or a 8th-gen+ Intel Core chip with Quick Sync — our Mini PC for Plex & Jellyfin guide explains which budget chips handle that well. And if you have a bit more room in your budget, compare our Best Mini PCs Under $300.

Always look for at least 8GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD storage in a complete system. Very cheap barebones listings often exclude RAM, storage, and an operating system, making their advertised price misleading — our catalog filters out incomplete barebones rows so the deals below are complete computers.