ThinkCentre M70q

the N97,N100,N150 processors tend to reach 100% CPU load during mid-heavy task so if you plan to use it for plex only nothing else it should be fine My used Lenovo M70q tiny been runing 24/7 for years now as a plex/jellyfin server just fine can do multiple 1080p streams at once and one 4K at a time

Your bottleneck isn't network or storage — it's transcoding. The Pi 4 doesn't have hardware video acceleration that Plex can use, so when a mobile client can't direct-play (mismatched codec, screen size, bandwidth limit), the Pi software-transcodes and 4 cores aren't enough. That's why "optimize for

That CPU will be fine but really overkill for what you're looking to do. If you want a really reliable workhorse I'd be looking for a used HP/Dell/Lenovo micro pc with a i5-12500T or better. The UHD 770 will give the same or better performance for plex transcoding and the big 3 have much better qual

To be candid, finding a ThinkCentre M70q Gen 3 with a SATA SSD, not NVMe, is slightly concerning as Lenovo didn't ship SATA SSDs with the Gen 3. Often when I've found this setup there been an issue with NVMe support. Depending on region, a Core i3-12100T + 32GB of RAM isn't bad @ 350$, although I'm

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