Thank you for your answer.
A few more words about my current setup. I have a 1U server running proxmox which is located 3m away from the TV. I've put a GT 1030 in passthrough in it, created a VM with an allocation of 2 CPUs / 2 cores and 8GB ram. As is Kodi is running perfectly for my current needs for 2 years now. As the VM is mostly idling in a 24/7 running server the "power usage overhead" is "negligible".
Unfortunately I have to move the server far away from the TV in 1 month and need to find a replacement solution for the Kodi player which will be placed next to the TV. I want the device to run on Linux as I have deployment / configuration ansible tasks ready and maintainance scripts available.
Regarding expected usage: the device will have one main purpose: play movies. Retro gaming via IAGL is a "plus" I would like to be able to have (children grow up, it would be nice to show them some old titles).
I would like the setup to have a small footprint and providing a good compromise between power usage and performance (note: tried a raspberry 4, the UI is laggy compared to my current setup). I also would like the device to be "easy to sell" or "easy to reuse for simple desktop tasks" later if needed.
I'm thinking about buying a thin-mini-itx case and motherboard with a low TDP cpu. (which means getting rid of the GT 1030)
The components I'm targetting about are a G6900T (UHD 710 iGPU) or i3-12100T (UHD 730 iGPU) with an ASUS MB PRO H610T-CSM motherboard (H610 chipset) in a Silverstone P13 case with 8GB ram. Audio will be carried over HDMI.
My questions are:
- what would be the "limitations to be expected" with this setup if any (for instance: "you can play seemlessly videos up to XXX resolution but be aware that you won't be able of YYY" or "forget about using IAGL emulator ZZZ" or "forget about resolutions/HDR/<younameit>") ?
- are there any benefits of using a UHD 730 over UHD 710 iGPU "for the type of planned usage" (i.e. watching movies, some retrogaming)
- as you are speaking about the motherboard: feature-wise what would be the "reasons" for selecting a mini-itx MB instead of a thin-mini-itx one ? (there are few available thin-mini-itx boards, and even fewer with at an affordable price)
Note about the difference price between the "T" and "non-T" CPU versions : I can get the G6900T 10 € cheaper than the G6900, and the i3-12100T for about the same price as the i3-12100. As such I prefer focusing on the "T" version of these CPUs.
Thank you in advance !