Yeah, I love the Hyve Zeus servers. I currently have three making up my proxmox cluster. They are great so long as you have another system for storage, as they only fit 2x 2.5" drives otherwise. I have my cluster linked to an SSD pool on trunas via 10gb for all my vm's.
As for the GPU - Yeah, it's too long because of the cooler. It's possible I could get an alternative cooler, and it's something I could look at. Although the server I bought for it has already been sent back since the gpu didn't fit.
The NUC isn't a bad idea, but I got a good deal on the P2000 and was hoping to utilize that. I recently started hosting plex for my in-laws, and want to get our daughter setup with an account with her going off to college. My current plex setup works fine, but as I'm adding people accessing it remotely, I just figured it would be nice to put the P2000 into play.
Thanks for the input. Yeah, my research has been more linux specific. My feeling was that Intel would perform well under linux, but browsing around most of what I've been finding are posts from a year ago, and nothing more current. I'm assuming that the cards (and more specifically driver support) would only get better in time (assuming it's not the next optane... haha).