My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I’m not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.

I bought a Grandstream GWN7660 last year and it seems pretty good, it replaced a ubiquity WAP that I still have legacy devices connected to.

Thanks for believing in me child.

Piracy has never been theft, it has always been and still remain copyright infringement. That being said go ahead and pirate, I’m not your dad.

I didn’t even know jellyfin had hw transcode till this post but I’m with this guy, Intel’s qsv is great. I have my plex server running bare metal on an gen 2 HP chromebox. It’s dual core but hw transcode with Intel QSV will do like 20+ 1080p streams.

Just be real careful with the chromebox, an lot of them can’t run Linux and are pretty low specs so I wouldn’t want try putting everything I want to run on them. The CPU in HP gen 2 one I have is just a dual core without hyper threading. I would only even look into the a Chromebox if your thinking about Plex pass and hardware transcoding.

Also should be noted anything bought used your not paying for a Windows license though most the SFF boxes come with windows license baked into the bios.

If you have Plex pass the key for 4k streaming is hardware transcoding. Quick sync with any newer Intel CPU, like 8th Gen and up, is going to hardware transcode 4k fine. Personally I bought an HP chromebox gen 2 and threw Linux on it to run Plex then have VMs and what not on separate small form factor boxes.

I’d bet you could probably run all the services you’re mentioning on something like a single USFF Optiplex but if you want to throw drives into it for storage then the towers would be the way to go.