Selfhosted

I was recently reading a lot about these because I wanted to use three Lenovo M920x for my homelab as virtualization hosts with Proxmox.

The really cool thing about them is their low power usage, that you can easily buy them used/refurbished and that you can fit a small PCIe expansion card into them.

I didn't use them in the end because sadly 22110 M.2 SSDs don't fit and I wanted to use enterprise SSDs for Ceph.

However, your use case seems simpler, so I'd think a M720q or maybe even M710q (without PCIe slot) would do, for less money than the M9xx series (which support vPro).

There's a really nice forum thread on ServeTheHome with loads of information about these units.

It's pretty meek on specs. It depends on how much you'd be paying for it. If it was free, I'd say go for it. If it's $100, you're halfway to a much more capable machine. The onboard graphics on this are going to be abysmal, even for video.

My advice would be to go for a 7th gen or upwards if your going intel as the processers igpu is what I would consider your minimum, secondly massgrave.dev should sort out your activation/licensing issues and also look into sunshine/moonlight for game streaming rather than steam link potentially

Can I please query the win10/11 because it's a shared console? What about it being a) shared or b) a console makes win 10/11 a requirement?

A consistent console-ish experience with pc-like access to games is more a case for Bazzite or steamos than a case for windows.

I'm using a M720q with an Intel i5-8400T for the same purpose and I'm happy with it.