MiniPCs

I have a laptop nearing the end of its life with (what I thought was) a good cpu/ram and an integrated graphics card. It was fine at running a DAW but it couldn't run 10 year old games at a non fucky framerate. I would include its details but I didn't memorize them and don't have access to it right now.

I'm looking at replacing it with a minipc because laptops are getting more user hostile but I like the idea of having something I can move around occasionally. So I look on the reddit spreadsheet, and I'm struggling because there often seems to be a gap between the listed specs on the spreadsheet and the actual thing itself (ie "this thing has this gpu" vs "this thing has a slot for you to install a gpu").

I absolutely need something that will run Reaper or an equivalent well with a billion tracks and add ons at the same time. I would very much like to run ten year old games reliably at a good framerate. And if possible I'd like to badly run a local ai which I understand basically requires a decent standalone gpu, but it isn't that important because they're a dumb toy that has no actual use. Is there a minipc that I can buy prebuilt that does that, and if not how close can I get? I don't know enough about hardware to answer my own question with the spreadsheet sorry.