And even the thin mini PCs have fairly low power consumption these days. I got one with dual gig ethernet for $150, x86_64, works great. Similar ones for $100 you could easily hang a few large drives off of.

Install a base OS, then docker compose a few services. Or buy a half dozen and deploy k8s.

Boom, "A cheap tiny personal server self hosting" (with COTS parts).

What did you find? I'm looking for something like that. Should be good for a router.

That's what I'm using mine for!

I'll make a post with the parts list and software install steps in a month or so if it would help anyone out. I bought https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GK2QSY1, and a few alternatives, and I'm going to benchmark their performance under heavy load (using a much studlier machine to generate traffic).

These mini PCs are getting to be _really cheap_. Cheap enough that my home infra is moving towards a tiny mini PC ($100 or less) attached to every pair of monitors, keyboards, and the network, and a central server to do actual work.

Another option is to buy a used "thin client". 1/10th the price, very similar power usage, small size. Some of them got room for a drive or even a quad intel nic (via pcie)