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I started on Elitedesk 800 G1s when Raspberry Pis got hard to find and expensive, and I now feel they are better in every respect if you don't need the GPIO pins.
Every time I open them up to upgrade something I'm impressed with the level of engineering. There are quality manufacturer manuals for them, the cooling is good and they look great
Yep! You can run almost anything on them, these are just x86 machines. However there are much smaller ones that aren't x86 and are actually proprietary ARM-based endpoints, but those are easy to spot usually as they don't have a lot of IO.
As for these ones though, people often repurpose them as low-power servers or firewall boxes.
There's an entire video series & articles called "Project TinyMiniMicro" where a server/homelab outlet ServeTheHome compares multiple popular models, looking at things like performance, cooling, upgradeability (some of these have half height PCIe slots inside), fan noise, thermal throttling, and a lot more.
Definitely worth a watch or a read if you're considering getting one of these, it's pretty comprehensive.
ive tossed hundreds, but i thunk ive got a box with a few around here somewhere. when i was using them i seeeemed to remember specifically picking the ones with a native windows rdp client, which would indicate x86. (win7 era)
im just looking to setup little media clients to connect to in-house flatscreens.