I'm a big fan of SuperMicro's Xeon D- series 1U short servers. Not really consumer grade, but not overly expensive either (about $1k on ebay for everything but the disk), and power consumption was not much higher than Atoms at the time I bought them.
I have a D-1541, 8 core (16 thread), 2100MHz @ 45W TDP, and two D-1518s, 4 core (8 thread), 2200MHz @ 35W TDP. They'll both run proxmox with a handful of containers, and another selling point was 10GbE, which is great if you're looking to upgrade your LAN.
I'm a big fan of SuperMicro's Xeon D- series 1U short servers. Not really consumer grade, but not overly expensive either (about $1k on ebay for everything but the disk), and power consumption was not much higher than Atoms at the time I bought them.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/87041/intel-xeon-d-processor.html
I have a D-1541, 8 core (16 thread), 2100MHz @ 45W TDP, and two D-1518s, 4 core (8 thread), 2200MHz @ 35W TDP. They'll both run proxmox with a handful of containers, and another selling point was 10GbE, which is great if you're looking to upgrade your LAN.