This just reminds me that I have my old MicroATX HTPC (remember that term?) that I built in about 2010 sitting in a closet. I bet I haven’t booted it since 2014. I wonder what’s on it…
HTPC are still very much a thing, I use mine for everything from MAME to watching a 72GB sized 4K copy of Apocalypse Now Redux. I think the major home theater receiver manufacturers continue to include a "PC" button on the remote control and a "PC" labeled input on their better receivers with five or six HDMI inputs.
I ended up getting a second hand Optiplex Micro for this. Tiny unit, low power usable, never even heard the fan switch on. Even with the slow frequency (2ghz) the Intel media decoders are brilliant at handling this stuff.
Mine was built with a leftover ryzen 1500X, microatx motherboard and RAM that were effectively free, a geforce 1030, and a random cheap 256GB SSD I found on newegg (the video content lives elsewhere across the LAN). It continues to be capable of playing 2160p60 H.265/HEVC content so I don't see a cpu and motherboard upgrade any time in the next couple of years, unless very high bitrate AV1 encoded content suddenly becomes more popular.
That sounds like it should be good for many years to come. Maybe if there is an uptake in AV2 once that is out then issues will come up. I'm not a shill but the one thing Intel have done well with their ARC cards is the media decoder. If their GPU space doesn't work out at least they have that and that could be a decent upgrade path in future.
I've tested it with 'normal' bitrate 1080p and 4K AV1 content and it still keeps up, staying under 70% CPU usage on all four cores, all AV1 decode in VLC is done in software since the geforce 1030/1050/1070/1080 generation of cards obviously has no capability for AV1... We'll see how it goes in 3-4 years.
Early SATA 3 and USB3 and the mainboard footprint is not much bigger than a miniPC. The enclosure it's in is about twice the size of a miniPC, 191 x 286mm, and the discrete little power supply probably has less than the recommended 200W. Enclosure only fits 2.5 inch drives, holds two of them but can't always power up both if they are HDDs when 4GB memory is installed. Never would handle a video card and there's no way one would fit inside the case anyway. Not really taking advantage of the SATA 3 yet, using an appropriate vintage HDD from a 2011 Macbook that's 160GB at SATA 2 which is half the speed.
But it has 3 video connectors from which you can choose any two, and decent sound.
This one has two full processor cores but it's not much faster to boot than my old Dell which does run at about twice the speed. The Gigabyte has a nice BIOS geared toward overclockers but it runs hot enough with default settings so that's enough.
Windows 11 in a MBR/BIOS layout, can only handle up to W11 23H2 but it's fully updated by manually installing the patch each month. Edge updates as expected. LAN drivers also less than a year old. OS takes up over 20GB of a 32GB partition. As drive space dwindles the manual patch installation using DISM will require a /scratchdir on a different partition than you are booted to, or on a storage drive having plenty of space.
This next one is 20 years old, still just sits there running:
32-bit only so it's Windows 10 x86. Used to play internet videos fine just a couple years ago, PC never changed but the internet got more encumbered. When it had XP it was snappier than a new Windows 11 PC at least.
I do use a PS2 mouse with each of these but only one with any balls at all :)