I just purchased a Minisforum mobo BD795i SE with a Ryzen 9 7945HX (16 core, 32 thread). Can’t beat the price to performance. Building a NAS / VM server with 5x 14TB Seagate Exos drives, 2TB NVME, 500GB boot SSD, and 96GB of DDR5 memory. I was able to buy all components including a 3u hotswap 5x drive caddy for less than $1,200 all in. Can’t really beat that.
For appliance-like quickly replaceable little servers like my firewall or other one off roles, they are ok for me, but to run my TrueNAS system (ZFS) I gotta run something with a Supermicro board and ECC. Mission critical workloads that need 24/7 uptime (homelab general purpose always-on server)!
I am running TrueNAS on it, honestly ECC is overblown out of proportion. This isn’t storing military state secrets.