Most mini PCs on Amazon cost more heading into Black Friday than they did in August. The memory shortage pushed DDR5 and LPDDR5X prices up all year, and the boxes built around that memory followed. So the Black Friday mini PC deals you should wait for this year are mostly prices falling back to where they sat before the spike. If you’re buying a Proxmox node, a local AI box or a Home Assistant server, the useful question isn’t “how much is off” but “is this below what it sold for a few weeks ago”.
We’ve pulled the same Amazon listings for our Proxmox mini PC guide, the local LLM picks and the Home Assistant hardware roundup since June, and those sourcing logs are the price history behind this page. Below are 11 homelab boxes, each with the lowest price we recorded, today’s price, a buy-below target and a verdict: buy now, wait, or skip. Prices and stock below were checked on October 24, 2026.
Black Friday mini PC deals at a glance
Only four of the 11 boxes are at the lowest price we’ve logged, and two of those are renewed business PCs. The other seven, all new, sit at the highest price in our records, which is why the “wait” verdicts outnumber the “buy” ones:
- Buy now, Proxmox on a budget: the renewed Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q, the cheapest it has been in our log and still the easiest box to add a NIC to.
- Buy now, local AI on a Mac: the Mac Studio M5 Max base model, $200 under Apple’s own price, as long as 36GB of memory covers your models.
- Fair price, 10GbE Proxmox node: the configured Minisforum MS-A2, because its barebone twin plus RAM and an SSD now costs more than the finished box.
- Wait, 128GB local AI: the Bosgame M5 is still the cheapest 128GB Ryzen AI Max+ 395 on Amazon, but it sold for $275 less in late September.
- Wait, Home Assistant: the Home Assistant Green sits $20 over its $199 list price on Amazon.
Black Friday falls on November 27 this year and Cyber Monday on November 30, and Amazon had not announced its 2026 event dates when we checked. Two brands are already discounting on their own stores. Minisforum’s Halloween sale runs from October 23 to November 2, and GMKtec’s runs to October 31. Neither beats Amazon on the configurations we link, though. Minisforum’s store had the 32GB MS-A2 at $1,335 and the 32GB MS-01 at $1,279, both above Amazon, and GMKtec matched Amazon on the 64GB EVO-X2 at $2,199.99.
You’ll find the numbers behind each verdict in the table below. Each pick then gets its own section with who should buy it, who should skip it, and the price at which we would stop waiting.
How we tracked these prices
Nearly every Amazon price on this page comes from Amazon’s Creators API, the product data feed Amazon gives its affiliates, queried for the exact ASIN we link; the one June reading for the Home Assistant Green was a check of the live listing. Each time we refreshed one of our hub guides, the result went into that guide’s sourcing log with a date, which gave us readings from mid-August through October for most boxes and from June for some. Because that window is short, a “lowest we recorded” figure means the lowest in our log, not an all-time low across the listing’s life. Where a lower price came from somewhere else, such as a deal reported by Notebookcheck, the section says so.
Specs come from each manufacturer’s product page or datasheet (Lenovo PSREF and HP QuickSpecs for the used business PCs), checked against an independent review. The hands-on testing lives in the hub guides: this page doesn’t re-benchmark anything, it tells you whether today’s price is worth paying. Amazon’s strikethrough “list price” is ignored on purpose, because on two of the listings we checked it is a figure we never saw either one sell at.
Price history for every pick
Read the “lowest recorded” column as a price you could already have paid once, which makes it the realistic Black Friday target. A deal that only matches today’s price is not a deal on this list.
| Box (config linked) | Best for | Lowest we recorded | Oct 24, 2026 | Buy below | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minisforum MS-A2 (32GB, 1TB) | 10GbE Proxmox node | $1,239 (Aug 11) | $1,299, 3 left | $1,240 | Fair now |
| Minisforum MS-01 (32GB, 1TB) | 10GbE Proxmox node | $1,159 (Aug 11) | $1,179 | $1,000 | Wait |
| Beelink SER8 (32GB, 1TB) | Fast single-NIC node | $499.99 (Aug 6, earlier listing, reported) | $859, 11 left | $650 | Wait |
| Beelink Mini S13 (12GB, 500GB) | Low-power N150 node | $339 (Oct 10) | $339 | $300 | Fair now |
| ZimaBoard 2 832 (8GB) | NAS plus containers | $299 (Sep 29, Oct 10) | $359.90 | $300 | Wait |
| Home Assistant Green | Home Assistant only | $199 (Jun 29) | $219 | $199 | Wait |
| Bosgame M5 (128GB, 2TB) | Large local LLMs | $3,324.04 (Sep 28) | $3,599, 12 left | $3,350 | Wait |
| GMKtec EVO-X2 (64GB, 1TB) | Mid-size local LLMs | $1,999.99 (Aug 13, earlier listing) | $2,199.99, 14 left | $2,000 | Wait |
| Mac Studio M5 Max (36GB) | Local AI on macOS | $2,299 (Oct 10) | $2,299 | $2,300 | Buy now |
| ThinkCentre M920q, renewed | Cheapest Proxmox node | $201.99 (Oct 24) | $201.99 | $215 | Buy now |
| EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini, renewed | Used node with 2 M.2 | $292.99 (Oct 20) | $292.99 | $280 | Fair now |
Two patterns stand out. Most new boxes built on DDR5 or LPDDR5X climbed between August and October, the MS-01 held flat at a high price, and the biggest jump belongs to the SER8, which rose 72% once its early-August dip ended. The used business PCs went the other way, because the people selling them aren’t paying 2026 memory prices for a 2019 machine. If you’re flexible on which box runs your homelab, that gap is the best deal on this page, and our used tiny PC guide covers the generations worth buying.
1. Minisforum MS-A2
If you need 10GbE in a Proxmox cluster, the MS-A2 is the mini PC we would pay full price for this Black Friday. It pairs a 16-core Ryzen 9 9955HX with two 10G SFP+ ports on an Intel X710, two 2.5GbE ports, a physical x16 slot wired for PCIe 4.0 x8, and three M.2 slots. One of those slots takes a U.2 drive, so a single box covers storage, a fast cluster link and a spare NIC.
Barebone math is why the configured unit wins. The barebone MS-A2 has held at $799 on Amazon since August, but a 32GB kit of DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs cost between $489.99 and $554.61 on Amazon on October 24. Barebone plus RAM therefore lands around $1,290 to $1,355 before you add an SSD. The finished 32GB, 1TB box was $1,299 that day. Last year the barebone was the smart buy; this year it only makes sense if you already have DDR5 SO-DIMMs in a drawer. TrendForce reported on October 20 that DRAM contract prices are expected to rise about 20% quarter on quarter in the fourth quarter, so the memory side of that sum is not getting cheaper before Black Friday.
- Buy it for: a 2 or 3 node Proxmox or Ceph cluster where the 10G SFP+ ports carry storage and migration traffic.
- Skip it if: one 2.5GbE port is enough, because you’d be paying about $440 over a SER8 for networking you won’t cable.
- Watch out for: stock, since the Amazon listing showed only 3 units left, and the price has risen $60 since mid-August.
We’d buy at anything under $1,240, the price it read on August 11. At $1,299 it’s still the better buy than the barebone, so if your cluster is waiting on hardware, do not hold out for a discount that the memory market may not allow. Check the live MS-A2 price on Amazon.
2. Minisforum MS-01
At today’s price, the MS-01 is the one to wait on. It is the older Intel sibling of the MS-A2, with the same layout that made it a homelab favourite: two 10G SFP+ ports, two 2.5GbE ports, two USB4 ports and a PCIe slot. It runs a 14-core Core i9-13900H, though, and costs only $120 less than the MS-A2.
The 32GB, 1TB listing read $1,179 in August and again on October 24, with one $1,159 reading in mid-August, so it has barely moved while the MS-A2 climbed. Stable sounds good until you compare the two: for $120 more, the MS-A2 gives you 16 Zen 5 cores instead of a mix of performance and efficiency cores, which matters when Proxmox schedules VMs across all of them.
- Buy it for: Intel-specific needs such as vPro remote management or Quick Sync transcoding in a Plex or Jellyfin VM.
- Skip it if: you’re choosing purely on cores per dollar, where the MS-A2 wins at today’s prices.
- Watch out for: the hybrid core layout, since a guest’s vCPUs can land on the slower E-cores unless you pin latency-sensitive VMs to the P-cores.
At about $1,000, below anything we have recorded for it, it becomes the value 10GbE node again, because the gap to the MS-A2 would then pay for a second SFP+ DAC cable and a switch port. Minisforum’s own Halloween sale has the MS-01 barebone at $679, but add a $490 to $555 memory kit and you are back at the configured price. Its successor, the MS-02 Ultra, is the more interesting alternative: Minisforum’s store had it from $599 as an Ultra 5 235HX barebone and $1,159 for the Ultra 9 285HX barebone. The 235HX with 32GB and 1TB was $1,119, or $60 under the MS-01 on Amazon. We haven’t checked its full spec sheet for this page, so confirm the slot and NIC layout before you buy one instead. Our MS-01 vs MS-A2 comparison covers the platform differences in more depth. Check the live MS-01 price on Amazon.
3. Beelink SER8
The SER8 is the strongest single-NIC homelab box here and also the clearest example of what the memory shortage did to prices. An 8-core Ryzen 7 8745HS with 32GB of DDR5 and a 1TB SSD sold for $499.99 on Amazon in early August, according to a Notebookcheck deal report, and our own readings from September onward show $859.
A Black Friday coupon will not undo a 72% rise in two months, so treat $859 as the real price and judge the box on that. It’s quick and has USB4 for an external 10GbE adapter, but it has one 2.5GbE port, which means a VLAN-heavy firewall VM or a separate storage network needs an adapter from day one.
- Buy it for: a single Proxmox host running a dozen containers and a couple of VMs, or a beefy Home Assistant box with Frigate.
- Skip it if: you can wait, because a renewed M920q with 16GB covers light homelab duty for under a quarter of the price.
- Watch out for: stock, since the listing showed 11 units left and Beelink’s own store marks the US 32GB, 1TB version as a pre-order.
Our buy-below line is about $650, close to the $639 Beelink’s own store charged in August. Above that, the MS-A2 is the better spend if you need the cores, and the used boxes are better if you do not. Check the live SER8 price on Amazon.
4. Beelink Mini S13
The Mini S13 wins as the cheapest new box worth running Proxmox on, at a price that hasn’t moved. The listing we link, sold by Beelink, specifies an Intel N150 with 12GB of LPDDR5 and a 500GB SSD, and it read $339 on October 10 and again on October 24.
Twelve gigabytes is the catch. LPDDR5 is soldered to the board by design, so you cannot grow it, and once Proxmox, a Home Assistant VM and a handful of LXC containers are running, there’s little room left. That makes the S13 a good single-purpose box (Pi-hole, a reverse proxy, Home Assistant) and a poor first cluster node.
- Buy it for: a quiet, low-power appliance that runs a few services around the clock.
- Skip it if: you want 32GB later; the renewed M920q costs less and takes SO-DIMMs.
- Watch out for: configuration drift, because the S13 Beelink launched with a single 16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM, and other S13 listings still sell that upgradeable version.
A Black Friday price under $300 would make it an easy buy. At $339 it is fair, and nothing in our log suggests it will spike, so you lose nothing by waiting a month. Check the live Mini S13 price on Amazon.
5. ZimaBoard 2
The ZimaBoard 2 is the pick when the box has to be a small NAS and a container host at once, and its listing swings enough that waiting is worth it. The 832 model, with an Intel N150, 8GB of LPDDR5 and 32GB of eMMC, sold for $299 on September 29 and was back at $359.90 on October 24.
I/O sets it apart from the mini PCs: two SATA ports for real drives, two 2.5GbE ports and a PCIe 3.0 slot (x4, per CNX Software), in a case that idled under 7W in CNX Software’s NAS-mode test. The trade-off is memory and storage, because 8GB is soldered and 32GB of eMMC is a boot drive, not a datastore.
- Buy it for: a two-drive NAS running OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS alongside a few Docker containers.
- Skip it if: you need more than 8GB, in which case the 16GB 1664 model was $419.90 on the same day.
- Watch out for: heat under sustained load, since early firmware throttled at 95 to 97°C in CNX Software’s testing.
Hold out for $300 or less. IceWhale’s own store sold the board alone for $339 on October 24, and the Amazon listing has sold at $299 twice this autumn, most recently on October 10, so paying $359.90 now means paying a premium the listing has shown it can drop. Check the live ZimaBoard 2 price on Amazon.
6. Home Assistant Green
Home Assistant Green is the right box if all you want is Home Assistant, with nothing to install and nothing to maintain, but do not pay over list for it. Nabu Casa’s list price is $199, and the Amazon listing has read $219 since September.
Inside is a Rockchip RK3566 with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC, powered from a 12V barrel jack, with Gigabit Ethernet and two USB 2.0 ports for a Zigbee or Thread dongle. You get plenty for automations and a few dozen integrations. What you do not get is a server: there’s no Proxmox, no headroom for a camera NVR like Frigate, and no room to grow beyond Home Assistant OS.
- Buy it for: a first Home Assistant install where the hub should just work.
- Skip it if: you’ll want camera NVR, local voice or other VMs, where the Mini S13 or SER8 makes more sense.
- Watch out for: paying $20 over list on Amazon; the official Home Assistant site lists other resellers worth checking first.
Buy at $199. Our Home Assistant mini PC guide compares it with the x86 options if you are unsure which side of that line you sit on. Check the live Home Assistant Green price on Amazon.
7. Bosgame M5 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 128GB)
The Bosgame M5 is the cheapest way on Amazon to get 128GB of fast unified memory for local LLMs, and it is still worth waiting for. It uses AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of LPDDR5X and a 2TB SSD, and it was $3,324.04 in late September and early October against $3,599 on October 24.
Even at $3,599 it undercuts every other 128GB Ryzen AI Max+ 395 box we track on Amazon: the 128GB, 2TB GMKtec EVO-X2 was $3,649.99, the GMKtec X3 $3,799.98 and the Beelink GTR9 Pro $4,349 on the same day. Those boxes add things the M5 doesn’t, like dual 10GbE on the GTR9 Pro, but if you want a single inference box, the extra money buys nothing your model can use. Our Ryzen AI Max+ 395 comparison walks through each one.
- Buy it for: running 70B-class quantised models or large mixture-of-experts models entirely in memory.
- Skip it if: your models fit in 64GB, where the EVO-X2 below saves about $1,400.
- Watch out for: memory bandwidth, which limits token speed on big dense models far more than the 128GB capacity suggests.
We’d buy under $3,350, which is where it sat a month ago. The listing showed 12 units left. If stock runs out before Black Friday, the fallback is GMKtec’s own store, which had the EVO-X2 with 128GB and a 1TB SSD at $3,499.99 in its Halloween sale (to October 31; the regular store price is $3,999.99). That is $99 under the M5 today, for half the SSD, and the 2TB EVO-X2 was $3,649.99 on Amazon. Check the live Bosgame M5 price on Amazon.
8. GMKtec EVO-X2 (64GB)
The 64GB EVO-X2 is the entry ticket to Ryzen AI Max+ 395 performance, and the one most worth catching on sale because it has already been cheaper. It has the same chip as the Bosgame M5 with half the memory and half the storage. The listing we link read $2,199.99 on October 24; a 64GB EVO-X2 listing was $1,999.99 on August 13.
Sixty-four gigabytes is a real limit on this chip, because the GPU borrows its memory from the same pool the operating system uses. You still have room for 30B-class models with long contexts, which covers most coding assistants and RAG setups. A 70B model only fits at 4-bit quantisation with a short context, so the 128GB boxes are the ones bought for that tier. The memory is soldered, so the decision is final at checkout.
- Buy it for: a local coding model or a private RAG box that also doubles as a fast desktop.
- Skip it if: you already know you want 70B models with room for long contexts, because upgrading later means buying a second box.
- Watch out for: the EVO-X2’s fan noise under sustained load, which Tom’s Hardware’s review flagged as louder than expected.
Our target is $2,000, the August price. At $2,199.99 it is still the cheapest new Ryzen AI Max+ 395 we track, so the wait is about $200, not about whether it’s good value. Our local AI mini PC guide sets it against the Mac and DGX Spark options. Check the live EVO-X2 price on Amazon.
9. Apple Mac Studio M5 Max
The base Mac Studio M5 Max is the one local AI machine on this list with a genuine discount right now. Apple sells it for $2,499; Amazon had it at $2,299 on October 10 and still did on October 24, sold and shipped by Amazon itself.
You get an 18-core CPU, a 32-core GPU, 36GB of unified memory with 460GB/s of bandwidth, and 10Gb Ethernet. Bandwidth is the reason a Mac punches above its memory size for token generation, but 36GB is also your ceiling: it fits 30B-class quantised models, and anything bigger means a higher configuration that Amazon is not discounting.
- Buy it for: MLX or Ollama on macOS with mid-size models, on a box that also replaces your desktop.
- Skip it if: you need Linux, Proxmox or more than 36GB, where the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 boxes do more per dollar.
- Watch out for: the 512GB internal SSD, which fills quickly once you keep several model weights around.
$2,299 is our buy line, so it is a buy today if it fits your work. Amazon has held this price since at least October 10, and $200 off a current Apple desktop is already a meaningful cut. Check the live Mac Studio price on Amazon.
10. Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q (renewed)
The renewed M920q is the best homelab deal on this page, and the only box sitting at a fresh low in our log this week. The listing we link, a Core i5-8500T with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD, was $239.99 on October 20 and $201.99 on October 24.
Its PCIe 3.0 x8 slot keeps the M920q relevant in 2026. With Lenovo’s riser card, it takes a low-profile card such as the quad-port Intel I350-T4, which Lenovo offered as a factory option. The Mini S13 and the EliteDesk G6 cannot take one, and among the budget boxes here only the ZimaBoard 2 also has a PCIe slot. Lenovo’s PSREF spec sheet lists 32GB of DDR4 as the maximum, and two SO-DIMM slots mean upgrading costs DDR4 prices, not DDR5 ones. Storage is the weak spot: PSREF lists one M.2 SSD slot plus a 2.5-inch bay, and the bay and the PCIe card can’t be used together. The Intel I219-LM port and vPro add remote management on top.
- Buy it for: a first Proxmox node, an OPNsense firewall with a quad-port card, or a three-node practice cluster for under $650.
- Skip it if: idle power matters most, since an 8th-gen T-series chip draws more at idle than an N150.
- Watch out for: the riser and the low-profile bracket, which are separate Lenovo parts, so confirm the listing includes them before you plan on a NIC.
Buy now at anything under $215. Renewed stock moves fast at this price, and the listing showed only 10 units left. Check the live M920q price on Amazon.
11. HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini (renewed)
The EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini is the used pick for people who want more storage than the M920q, at a steady price. This renewed unit, with a Core i5-10500T, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, read $292.99 on both October 20 and October 24.
HP’s QuickSpecs list two internal M.2 slots plus a 2.5-inch SATA bay and support for 64GB of RAM, so a ZFS mirror for VM storage fits inside the case. The G6 also has a Flex IO port that HP offers with an Intel I225-LM 2.5GbE module, but this renewed listing doesn’t mention one, so plan on the single onboard port. Against the M920q, you give up the PCIe slot.
- Buy it for: a single Proxmox host with mirrored NVMe storage and room for 64GB later.
- Skip it if: you plan to add a NIC card, which the M920q handles and the G6 doesn’t.
- Watch out for: the 256GB SSD, which is too small for VM storage, so budget for a second NVMe drive.
You are paying a fair price today, and under $280 we would call it a deal. Check the live EliteDesk 800 G6 price on Amazon.
How to spot a fake Black Friday mini PC deal
Most bad deals on mini PCs are not scams. They are a real price presented against a reference price that never existed, or a configuration that hides its real cost. These checks caught every one we found while building this page:
- The strikethrough price: the GMKtec X3 128GB showed a $5,499.99 list price and “31% off” at $3,799.98, a list price we never saw it sell at. A renewed Dell OptiPlex 7080 Micro showed “55% off” a $699 list. Compare against the price history above, not the strikethrough.
- Barebone versus configured: with 32GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM kits at $490 to $555, a barebone is only cheaper if you already own the memory. Price the RAM before you celebrate a barebone discount.
- Soldered memory: the 12GB S13 we link, the ZimaBoard 2 and every Ryzen AI Max+ 395 box have soldered memory, so the amount you buy is the amount you keep. Buy for the workload you’ll have in two years.
- Look-alike listings: the same model often sells under several ASINs with different RAM, NIC counts or sellers. Read the exact configuration in the title before you compare prices.
- Renewed versus used: Amazon backs “Renewed” items with a 90-day return window under its Renewed Guarantee, which a plain third-party “used” offer doesn’t carry. On business PCs, also check the seller name and whether the power adapter is included.
Memory is the part that changed this year. Our explainer on why RAM prices exploded in 2026 covers the cause, and the DDR5 buying guide tracks current kit prices if you’re pricing a barebone build.
Buy-below prices for your Black Friday watchlist
If you only set price alerts on a few boxes, set them at these numbers. Each one is a price the box has already sold at on Amazon or its maker’s store, so a Black Friday drop to that level is realistic, not wishful:
| If you’re building | Watch this box | Alert at | Fallback if it never drops |
|---|---|---|---|
| A cheap Proxmox node | ThinkCentre M920q, renewed | $215 | EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini at $292.99 |
| A 10GbE Proxmox cluster | Minisforum MS-A2, 32GB | $1,240 | Buy at $1,299; skip the barebone |
| A single fast homelab host | Beelink SER8, 32GB | $650 | MS-A2 if you need the cores |
| A NAS plus containers box | ZimaBoard 2 832 | $300 | Mini S13 with USB storage |
| Home Assistant only | Home Assistant Green | $199 | An authorised reseller at list |
| A 64GB local LLM box | GMKtec EVO-X2 64GB | $2,000 | Mac Studio M5 Max (36GB) at $2,299 |
| A 128GB local LLM box | Bosgame M5 128GB | $3,350 | EVO-X2 128GB, 1TB from GMKtec ($3,499.99 in its sale to Oct 31) |
For most homelabbers, the smartest Black Friday move this year is the dull one. Buy the renewed tiny PC now while it is cheap, set alerts on the new boxes at the prices they have already hit, and do not let a strikethrough price talk you into paying the shortage premium. If you end up with an M920q or an MS-A2 on the bench, the Proxmox VE 9 install guide picks up from there.
