For me, the benefit of discord is not the text chat but the voice aspect. With push to talk/voice activated transmission and low latency for gaming.

The voice features of matrix are more of a conference call thing.

Until this gets implemented in matrix (not sure if ever) I’ll continue hosting mumble (or TeamSpeak)

You can do a disk benchmark on the server to be sure

Make sure the device you pick up has low latency. Not sure if you can find specs like that in the spec sheets. For watching video, latency is not an issue, but when gaming, you want as little time as possible to go by between you pressing a button and the thing showing up on the screen.

Switching power supplies (“bricks”) are generally more efficient than linear power supplies because they lose less energy as heat. that’s were the difference comes from. (Of course they have drawbacks as well, like increased noise)