I recently went down a similar route - I needed a HTPC to connect to my TV and instead of a Pi I used an old Intel Celeron NUC I had laying around - unfortunate

I recently went down a similar route - I needed a HTPC to connect to my TV and instead of a Pi I used an old Intel Celeron NUC I had laying around - unfortunately I found out that the old Celeron[1] wasn’t really able to do 1080p video streaming fluidly (I tested from a variety of streaming websites). As far as I can remember [2], even my old Pi 2 was able to stream 1080p no problem. On the other hand, the NUC can boot from a SATA SSD, it can have plenty of RAM installed etc. So, regarding the question if it’s better to use an old PC or a Pi: I guess it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. [1] sorry I’m not home at the moment so I don’t have the model number, all I remember is that it was from the last generation of NUCs that still accepted DDR3 sticks, and that it’s got a Celeron processor. I set it up with Lubuntu and the streaming was done using default Firefox. [2] it was long ago so I don’t remember the details but I am pretty sure that on my first Pi, which must have been a Pi 2, I was able to watch YouTube no problem. I also remember reading articles at the time where people were raving about how good video playback was for such an affordable device.