Could work with Windows 7 and one box it is just outdated by 10 years. 8GB memory RAM is the minimum for Windows 10 and not recommended.
I use a 1000 dollar laptop that i purchased 3 years ago and i have an nvidia card and 8 gigs of ram running windows 11 no problems here. And if you need more than 4 gigs ram you can use virtual memory to get windows 10 working i think. He/she just says they dont wanna use a laptop cause reasons...
from microsoft.com Here's what it takes to upgrade to Windows 10 on your PC or tablet: Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS or 20 GB for 64-bit OS Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver Display: 800 x 600
Smak, please start reading before you post and remember you're giving feedback on a what'll be a big purchase for someone else. Both of those links to expensive AIO have integrated graphics (i.e. no graphics card), despite what you just described. If you actually looked at the specs you'd find they're poor performance per dollar. The OP made it clear they don't want a laptop for performance reasons & as I explained that when you look under the hood you'll generally just find an AIO contains the components of a low/lower mid-tier laptop.
as you mentioned EQ is mostly a CPU game but a decent video card helps. What you might consider before making a decision is "how long you plan on using a new system?" Windows 11 is coming and it will have special hardware requirements. Once it is out, Microsoft will be looking to sunset Windows 10. We're probably 4-5 years from that though. You could reuse your case, powersupply, and probably the video card from the old system, buy a win11 supported motherboard, at least 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB or higher SSD. Any modern processor with 4-8 cores will do to play EQ and do office apps, AMD or Intel. Visit Tom's Hardware for a guide on which will give the best bang for the buck.
BTW, for those of you dissing the $100 laptops from Ebay. I've used one I got for about $90 to box EQ for the last 4 years. I have to turn the settings way down on it but it does a good job. You do have to do a little maintenance though to make sure it has good air flow and cooling. I pulled the cover off and vacuumed it out good and added some decent thermal paste.
I just upgraded to a ryzen 5700x and 64gb of ram, no difference between my old cpu and ram literally, and if you are wanting something cheap hit your local pawn shops, they usually have people who do a very good job of cleaning those machines up at a lower price than retail
I did the same thing for a truebox TLP. Also re: load times, I put EQ on a RAM drive ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive ) and found no noticeable performance benefits. I think the biggest cost to zoning is CPU + network transfer speeds + waiting for EQ servers. I bet decompressing textures is a big cost, wish I could store decompressed textures on my NVMe drive. Profiling by sniffing packets is probably against the rules but I'd be interested to hear what people found if they did it.