Used PC for media server

[TheDreadPirate]

If I had to choose, I'd get one of the Dell Optiplexes you listed. I'm leaning towards the 5050 since it appears to have a SSD. "500GB" on the 7040 tells me it is a HDD for the system drive. And having a SSD for the OS and Jellyfin appdir is very important. 7th gen and newer Intel CPUs/iGPUs support 10-bit HEVC decoding, so you can handle one or two 4K HDR to SDR conversions. And you can add a dedicated GPU later to handle additional streams. When talking about 1080P SDR source videos, any of them are sufficient for several simultaneous transcodes.

In regards to our recommendation to get 11th gen Intel and newer has to do with Intel deprecating support for older CPUs for their OpenCL package, which is used for HDR to SDR conversion.

However, if plan on using Linux, and installing directly on Linux without Docker, Intel has provided a "legacy CPU" OpenCL package. If you do want to use Docker, you can use the linuxserver Docker image which lets you specify which OpenCL package to install. Which our Docker image cannot do (yet).