For $600 the Minisforum MS-R1 gives you 64GB DDR5 ECC, 12 cores, dual 10GbE, a real PCIe 4.0 x8 slot, M.2 NVMe, Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO, and actual UEFI boot. It runs Debian and Proxmox/KVM.

I've read that the CPU is trash compared to intel/amd in performance and in TDP, but you can't build a mini pc/server on intel/amd right now for thaf price with that amount of RAM.

Even just buying the 64GB ddr5 RAM as sticks will be like over 800$...

In the low budget range you can go with a Pi 5 16GB which is now ~$300. Add PSU, case, NVMe HAT, PCIe HAT and you're at $500+. It's way too expensive for what you get, compared to spending a bit more and going with minisforum.

Yeah you can get old used boxes with that amount of RAM for maybe the same price, but they'll such 200W and electricity is expensive where I live.

My current pine64 soquartz cluster over the past 5 years has been dying node by node and I can't run anything more demanding on it (like game servers or local AI). It cost me about 600$ back then with 5x blade + nvme + soquartz module, a poe switch and a case with fans. Kinda seems like a bad deal now, I'm stuck with all the docker swarm issues and the bad cpu cores and max 8gb ram per node. Oh and it draws 52W. If the minisforum 12W TDP is correct, I will save over 100$ per year on electricity costs alone.

Maybe i'm biased and trying to justify my own purchase ... let me know if I'm wrong about it being good value.