It’s a bit of a sledgehammer approach, but a Nuc with Proxmox is pretty excellent. You can even use 10gbe via thunderbolt (or the pci slot on the larger Nucs).
So far I'm pretty impressed with my Rk3588 board, 8gb ram, and dual 2.5gbe.
It's a bit more than half as fast as my quad core/8 thread xeon desktop, but that's abotu where I'd expect one of the cheaper x86 NUC/Mini PC/Thin clients to land.
Are there any boxes without a graphics card or at least with a primitive one? So that they would be more economical in case you only need them for the role of a server?
None of them have a dedicated GPU, just a low-powered one built into the CPU. Using a CPU without an integrated GPU would only shave a few dollars off the cost, so I don't that is a common choice.
The weird extreme range (not really Nucs in my view) have a pci slot, seemingly for a large graphics card. They’ll take an SFP card though, and that’s a excellent, though probably the most expensive mini server one could buy.
All the small Nucs just use an iGPU. Boxes like the Nuc 8 have a bit of a cult following as the iGPU is surprisingly powerful. It’s probably beaten by newer models now. The newer ones have lots of cores, and when fully loaded with memory make a handy little box for VMs.
