A few years ago I was looking into a small and lower power consumption Single Board Computer to replace the Pentium 4 tower I had laying on its side as a HTPC. What worked out nice was that the Roku came out and was a perfect fit for what I needed. Small, Low Power Consumption, and as a bonus I didnt have to load any HTPC software to it it was ready out of the box and the price tag of $35 was a bargain. Prior to this I tried the Chromecast, but wasnt impressed with its inability for stand alone operation so the Chromecast was a waste of money and thrown into the junk box because once registered with a gmail account the devices are non transferable so I couldnt even try to sell it for $20 to get some money back as for I'd have to give my gmail account with it to whomever I sold it to so it is junk. The one feature the Roku didnt have though was the ability to play my own digital media, however I could play the media through a computer that was on my network with the Plex TV service. But when I was cleaning up some tangled cables I saw a USB port on the back of my Sony Blu-ray Player and looked into its use and realized it supports USB connected drives up to 32GB in size as FAT32, so I then was able to store content on a USB stick or external hard drive with a 32GB FAT32 partition and play the media off of that.
These single board computers aren't very powerful and so their use is limited. Games might be limited to Indie Titles for games that dont require any strong CPU/GPU to run them etc.
I tried to get by with a ITX board computer once as a space safer attempt, but what I found was that all I did was buy into a board that had limited future use. It could handle up to a Phenom II Quadcore CPU, but it only had a 4x PCI Express slot and the integrated video was a weak GeForce 6150 GPU. This ITX was ok as a server or workstation that wouldnt do anything too graphically intense, but I soon found myself retiring it because it wasnt a space saver solution that could play games.
So I moved on to connecting a laptop to my desktop setup for a bit a few years ago when the local power company decided to double the rates for electricity turning $150 a month electric bills into $300, and I went through a instant reduction phase of making sure lights are off in rooms not being used and only stuff on when using it as well as shutting down my power hungry computers and using computers that could get by that used far less electricity. But while the laptop was able to play games and was a space saver, it was short lived as a permanent setup for desktop computer use because when the power company eased back on how bad they were sticking it to us, I switched back to using my desktop computers again that used up to 10x the amount of electricity that the laptap was using in favor of performance vs electron sipping as I was.
A friend of mine who works in IT uses single board computers as thin clients and they work awesome. There isnt much to go wrong with a thin client. And a thin client doesnt need to be that powerful as for the brunt of the processing is server side in sessions. Single Board Computers unless higher end performance components for Graphics and Gaming, they are just pretty weak. They work fine for non intensive applications I suppose.
