Reddit mentions of ASRock Motherboard & CPU Combo Motherboards J3455B-ITX

I use a number of these Asrock embedded boards for the kinds of things you're describing.

They're significantly more powerful than a Pi, but still only draw about 15W. The Intel iGPU offers up encoding options for video stuff, too. The board, some RAM, a PSU, and a small case are definitely not as cheap as a pi overall but can often be acquired pretty cheap secondhand, at least where I live.

They make great file servers, pfSense boxes, and I've even done them up as ESXi or Hyper-V hosts and then run several VMs on them at once like DC/DNS and a Pihole all in one box for instance.

I went through a similar situation about a year ago. I had a half rack of dell equipment that I sold to a friend when I moved because it was more than I needed and a pain to move. I have slowly been building back up but my favorite find so far has been some ASRock cpu/motherboard combo units.

ASRock Motherboard & CPU Combo Motherboards J3455B-ITX https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M7OUO62/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_UYiVCbV090VW3

I got one to just run Plex and ended up getting two more. I now have a cluster of three of them that I use to run a three node proxmox cluster. They have quad core atom cpus and I put 16GB of ram in them. I now use them for the little things I like to run at home. I have a DNS pair, dhcp, a few different web servers, Redis, Mariadb, etc... basically just a bunch of mostly idle vms. It works fantastically for me and I love it.

I still have a large tower I run my storage on so I even install the os for them all on a 16gb flash drive. I have a post on my blog about it if you wanna see pictures or get more info.

https://advancedvector.com/whats-under-the-hood/

All in all though they are low powered and have passive cooling that I have never had an issue with but still have enough sack to tinker.

Wow, looks like it would make a good NAS, I could use the SATA ports. And the Intel NICs are a nice touch.

For only $80 I can wholeheartedly recommend the AES-NI
ASRock Motherboard & CPU Combo J3455B-ITX https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M7OUO62/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_ToTOzbZ6EY0FE
But only if you can deal with the PCIe x16 slot running at X2, tricky finding a compatible PCIe nic.

Mobo: ASRock Motherboard & CPU Combo Motherboards J3455B-ITX (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M7OUO62/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_VfhFDbX9KYE03)

RAM: 2x 4GB DDR3 SODIMM

Case: CoolerMaster Elite 110 ITX

NIC: 4 Port Intel NIC.

Completely fanless, can everything I throw at it so far (1 Gbps Internet) and doesn't even break a sweat.

My experience using a Pi3 as a Kodi box have found that certain design decisions make it too weak and inflexible for the full-fledged media PC I want it to be. So I'm currently planning on building a small server to offload some of the tasks that the Pi is weak in (storing data, heavy network traffic, seeding various decentralized networks, etc.) and using the Pi as sort of a thin client. Hanging out on /r/homelab I've picked up on a few options for an x86 system I can use. x86 being more popular, I have more options, plus I can make better use of virtual machines and containers.

My current favorites are the Asrock Q1900M a $70 dual core processer with a 10W TDP or the Asrock J3455B-ITX, which may or may not be a refresh with a newer CPU architecture (thus higher IPC) but at the same price, same TDP, and roughly the same clock speed with twice the cores, its definitely tempting.

I would love to recomend smaller ARM boards, but I honestly know very little about them. Just don't forget that low-end x86 boards exist with low(ish) power usage exist. While more expensive up front, they do provide a lot more flexibility and expandibility if you end up going down the /r/homelab route with lots of self-hosted services.