Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny (refurbished) review: do you need a £150 PC?

Dispossessed earns a small commission from qualifying Amazon purchases made through links on this page. That does not affect what we recommend — or how little of it we recommend.

Verdict

Buy a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny if you want a real, quiet, upgradable PC for around £150 and you are happy with older silicon: it is a genuine six-core desktop that mounts behind a monitor and will happily run a home server, a second machine, or a child's homework station. Skip it if your priority is the lowest possible power bill (a new N100 mini PC wins there) or a full manufacturer warranty on a brand-new box. Used, this is one of the most honest answers to “do I actually need a new computer” — most people already own something that does the job.

Who it's for

• Buy it if: you want a headless home server, a Pi-hole / Home Assistant box, a lightweight Proxmox host, or a quiet second PC that tucks behind a monitor and disappears.
• Buy it if: you need real multi-core grunt for less than the price of a night out — a six-core 8th-gen i5 still beats many newer budget chips on threaded work.
• Skip it if: you want the lowest idle power and a silent, brand-new machine. Coffee Lake draws more at rest than an N100 and carries an unknown prior duty cycle.
• Skip it if: you want a full warranty and zero risk. This is renewed hardware with a 12-month dealer cover, not a sealed new box.

Key specifications

What stands out

• Six cores for the price of a takeaway. An 8th-gen six-core i5 at ~£150 is more multi-threaded horsepower than a lot of new sub-£200 mini PCs in heavy or parallel workloads, and it ships with Windows 11 Pro and TPM 2.0 ready to go.
• It is genuinely tiny and quiet. At one litre and TÜV-certified ultra-low-noise, it mounts behind a monitor and vanishes. A refurbished fleet machine was built to run in an office all day, so it is engineered to be unobtrusive.
• It is upgradable in a way new mini PCs often are not. Two SO-DIMM slots (up to 32 GB) and dual storage (NVMe + 2.5" SATA) mean you can expand RAM and add a second drive. The Tiny ecosystem even supports a low-profile PCIe riser for a 2.5 GbE or quad-NIC card — a tidy home-lab starting point.
• It is the literal buy-less answer. Buying used keeps a working machine out of e-waste and avoids triggering new manufacturing. For a site built on “do you need this,” a refurbished PC is the most on-brand purchase on this whole blog.
• Windows 11 Pro out of the box. TPM 2.0 and Pro licensing mean it is happy running Hyper-V, WSL2, Proxmox, or a stack of Docker containers without fighting the OS.

Where it falls short

• Power efficiency is the real trade-off. A 35 W TDP 8th-gen part idles far higher than an N100 (6 W) or N150. Left running 24/7 as a home server, the electricity gap is real over a year — and it runs warmer and louder under load than modern low-power silicon.
• The refurb lottery is real. Cosmetic marks are expected, but stands, SATA caddies, or the Wi-Fi card are sometimes missing, and “renewed” warranties are 12 months from a dealer, not Lenovo. You are buying someone else's former daily driver with an unknown power-on history.
• No modern media engine. UHD 630 handles 4K playback but lacks AV1 hardware decode, so as a Plex / Jellyfin transcoding box it is weaker than a newer N-series mini PC with Quick Sync.
• RAM ceiling and speed cap. Officially 32 GB max at 2666 MT/s is fine for most uses but rules it out as a workstation; newer platforms go further and faster.
• Limited internal expansion. One M.2 and one 2.5" bay is enough for one machine, but if your actual goal is shared network storage you will outgrow it fast — that is a different product category entirely.

Alternatives worth considering

• A new Beelink MINI S13 (N150, 16 GB). Lower power, quieter, newer, and warrantied — but less multi-core grunt and less expandable. Our full Beelink MINI S13 review covers who the new low-power route suits.
• Another refurbished business box (Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP ProDesk Mini). Same value proposition, sometimes cheaper; the buy-less logic is identical. Check the exact CPU generation and RAM before you commit.
• Buy used direct (CeX, eBay) and skip the refurb margin. More saving, more risk — verify the PSU and that Wi-Fi is included. Our new-vs-refurbished reasoning applies to most long-lived gear.
• A UGREEN NASync if storage is the real need. If you mostly want shared files and backups, a NAS beats bolting drives onto a Tiny. See our UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus review.
• Honestly: your current laptop. Run the “do you need this at all” test we apply to every gadget first — for browsing and streaming, what you own probably still works.

Bottom line

The refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny is one of the few gadgets on this site we can recommend without embarrassment because it is used: around £150 buys six real cores, Windows 11 Pro, and a near-silent, mountable box that is a genuine home-server or second-PC starter. The honest caveats are power draw, an unknown refurb history, and a 12-month dealer warranty rather than a new-box guarantee. Buy it if you want capability and value and can live with older silicon; buy a new N100 mini PC if a low power bill and a full warranty matter more; and if all you need is web and video, the machine you already own probably passes the test. Check the live price and read current owner feedback before you commit:

View the refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny on Amazon UK →

Basis of review: this is not a hands-on test — no unit was bought or lived with. The verdict is built from Lenovo's published PSREF specifications, expert coverage (PCMag, ServeTheHome), and aggregated public owner feedback from Reddit and Amazon UK. No price is stated because Amazon Associates rules forbid displaying scraped prices; use the link above for the current figure.