ThinkCentre M70q

i've been down this road with the whole n100 vs used tiny pc thing. what helped me was grabbing an Intel NUC 11 with Core i5 when prices dropped. the quick sync on 11th gen handles 4k hdr transcoding without breaking a sweat and you get dual channel ram. for under 300 eur look for used Lenovo ThinkC

I would say go for 2nd hand Lenovo Thinkcentre M70q Gen 3. I bought mine for $200 with warranty and upgraded to 16gb RAM and added a 1TB 2.5" HDD. (Came with i3 12100T, 8GB ram + 500gb nvme) and keep the extra cash. It supports 2 x NVME + 1 x 2.5" SATA + 2 x DDR4 SO-DIMM + and has like 6 X USB 3 + H

All of those models are REALLY old. The Dell OptiPlex 7010, 790, and 9010, are from the early 2010s and are only DDR3. The Precision T5500 is a workstation from the same DDR3 era but only accepts ECC RAM. Workstations typically have different processor, ram and other options compared to consumer dev

I guess it depends on the use case. My kids do game stream (Sunshine/Moonlight) so codec support was important and therefore we went with NUCs (12 Pro I think). For my homelab, I went with two Lenovo M70Q Gen 3. Quiet, small, easy to upgrade and quite thrust worthy brand. Those can be found for €250