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Unless the developers voluntarily give out refunds (see Rust), don’t expect Valve to step in unless a given individual meets the general refund policy requirements.

There have historically been numerous cases of developers selectively dropping support for certain platforms (officially and now much more unofficially by just blocking Proton rather having a native release to begin with). Some developers willingly gave refunds to users that played the once-supported games on said platforms. Other times, they have not; and I do not know of a single case in which Valve stepped in when developers/publishers refused/ignored.

If there is some consumer-protection law in your jurisdiction that would apply to licensed access to media, then you may have recourse that way. Otherwise, anyone seeking a refund is unlikely to get one.

Based on OP’s edit, that looks correct. Unless OP checks the topology and can make the claim that drives from the main chipset are the slow ones, secondary chipset drives will tend to perform slower, and the ASMedia ASM1061 has several reports online of poor to trash performance compared to baseline.

Best bet if the full performance is necessary out of every drive would be finding a decent quality PCI-E SATA III riser card that doesn’t use a known flawed driver chip rather use the two ‘extra’ ports on the motherboard.

I mean, the mini PCs don’t come with a managed switch, and often without good wireless connectivity that most home routers will come equipped with. So in total with Wi-Fi APs and a decent switch, definitely more than €100 in total.

Also unrelated, but if you’re running a x86 system with gigabytes of RAM, why not run Opnsense at that point?

Looking up the router, it was allegedly produced in 2024, according to the OpenWRT wiki. Barring any outliers, OpenWRT generally only sunsets hardware when a new version has higher hardware requirements than is provided by a device. The supported devices page lists out the hard requirements as well as recommendations. Currently 8 MiB flash storage is the minimum, with 16+ MiB recommended (for additional functions, user addons, etc.). 64 MiB is the minimum RAM target, with 128+ MiB recommended. According to the router’s wiki page, your chosen router exceeds both recommended requirements. Overall, the router should be suitable for a good while not barring any severe hardware or bootloader-level exploitable vulnerabilities are discovered with the device.

Depending on what you want to do with the router, getting something with more RAM and a stronger CPU could be beneficial for various tasks (e.g. adblock-fast, cake sqm, etc.). Definitely do research on what you want your router to do though before choosing to go with higher specs or not.