I need and was thinking of building a new general purpose / streaming machine and it would be ultra convenient if it were a small form factor. So what I had in mind was to use a Gigabyte Brix bare bones machine, as it is super small, but have never used one so I am unsure of their performance. The specific machine in question was the GB-BXi3-4010. It has an i3-4010U which is the part I'm most interested in. It scores a couple thousand points on passmark, which i feel is a good benchmark to compare parts.
As far as streaming, it would need to handle a few rtmp streams, encode, and re-stream it. I think this machine ought to be capable because I've already attempted to do this on an old optiplex machine with a Pentium D, and it can handle a couple sreams but only a couple, then also has random lag spikes.
What are your thoughts? I only plan on putting a small 32GB mSATA SSD, as I need virtually none but fast storage, and 8GB of RAM.