I will give you an interesting comparison in my opinion. I have an HP DL380 G7 128GB RAM server and a 500GB SSD. I took out one CPU for lower power consumption, at idle I have 80W. When I run two servers minecraft, plexa, XPenology(NAS), WIN11, HomeAssistant then after loading everything the server draws 85-90W. All in Proxmox. For comparison I moved all the machines to a Dell Optiplex with an i5-6500 and 32GB RAM, here the CPU goes with a load of 85% and the computer drew 95Watt all the time with the same machines. You have to answer whether the server is going to do anything or not. If you’re going to be running something from time to time then a desktop PC is better, but if there’s going to be something running all the time then a server is better. Of course, I am not talking about a file server, because then it is not worth it.

Hey, I use this configuration. Assuming, if you have ZEROTIER installed on two devices then in my.zerotier check what IP address the server is assigned. On the other machine you enter that address in rdp and it connects. The same with accessing a network resource, you map the share, entering the IP address from the ZEROTIER server