Could a Toshiba Portege R700 host a mc server?

Yes, but it's going to be a bit of a battle making it performant, considering it has a first gen i5 cpu. Thermal throttling from poor laptop heat dissipation may become an issue as well.

If you take great care to maximize performance via JVM flags, performance mods, and settings tuning, you pregenerate your world, and you run it on a lightweight linux distribution, it could work, but it will never be an easy matter. You'll always have to make sacrifices to make it work.

Not impossible, though.

When I checked it said mine had a i3 M380 (something in that series, not sure on the exact model). Probably going to pre generate the world and set the world border to like 15k.

I also have a pi 4 4gb I can use, but I’m assuming that will perform worse

Then that's a first gen i3. Even worse.

Hard to say. There's a lot to be said for modern CPU architectures tbh. Neither are going to be great, but a 14.5 year old, budget-series CPU is going to suck pretty hard. The RPi4 might actually be better.

I’ll give it a shot I guess

Worse that can happen is it just lags

Yup. Modded you said? Fabric hopefully?

That’s the plan

Cobblemon + a few addons and a custom mod I’m making for it

You will benefit greatly from running the standard array of Fabric performance mods.

https://github.com/TheUsefulLists/UsefulMods/blob/main/Performance/Performance121.md#fabric-121x

There's a decent reference page for them. I don't recommend using them ALL, but many/most are quite good.

I tried chunk generation on the pi but it was slow even with performance mods

Like I was easily able to outspeed it

Yeah, in either case you will want to use Chunky to pregenerate the world. I would strongly recommend setting a modest worldborder and then running the Chunky worldborder pregeneration command, then giving it several days up to a week with no players to just generate chunks. Loading chunks is DRAMATICALLY more performant than generating them on the fly. Keep an eye on the server as it does, in case it crashes. Chunky can auto resume from where it left off once you start it back up, but it can't restart the server for you.

Oh ok, I might generate it on my pc first then copy it over, so generation will be significantly faster

Good plan.

I think the Toshiba will be faster than the pi as it’s clock speed is nearly 1ghz faster

That is not an accurate measure of CPU performance. Clock speed is a useful tool for marketing.

The hidden value that is not revealed in the clock speed is the processor's IPC, or instructions per cycle.

Basically how much can the CPU actually do with each clock cycle.

And that has DRAMATICALLY improved in recent years.

The fact that the i3 is about 10 years older than the RPi4 suggests that the RPi4's cpu will likely have a dramatically higher IPC, meaning that it does more with its lower CPU clock speed.

That's why I say that the RPi4 might actually be better.

And is why we generally don't say ANYTHING about CPU GHz recommendations, instead recommending a recent processor, within the last 2-5 years if possible.

@Palomino Benchmarks are not tuned for Minecraft server performance needs and are almost never accurate. We don't allow use of benchmarks around here, because they are so incredibly misleading.