I also explored the SBC route, and still have several but finally came to the conclusion that you make up above.
I bought a bunch of thinclients on auction brand new sealed in box and they work like a charm.
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This just screams CEPH at me 
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The odssey (I cannot rememeber the spelling) from seeed uses hdmi. But display port is often used to save the royalty to the hdmi people. And the PSU is stock standard style. So easy to replace
I’d be most concerned about long term power costs. I like the ideas of Pi zero 2’s as cheap and very low power. They don’t have much RAM 512MB, but with no window manager, you don’t need much for the OS.
For sure not much is going to compete with a zero but without fresh and exact numbers, off the top of my head these draw around 20w.
With the pi-zero you still need to add ethernet and ssd/hdd power usage. Also consider that the same workload that puts a pi-zero under heavy load, probably is still considered idle on a thin client cpu.
I have a https://files.seeedstudio.com/products/ODYSSEY_X86J4125_user_manual.pdf.pdf
Its power supply is a 12V 2A power adaptor. I’ve added a SSD and a SATA drive and can run win11 or linux. I run linux of course and the Odyssey is a 64 bit X86 computer and has a RPi as a co-processor.
While its $200 odd dollars new, it seems quite a capable unit. And it draws similar power to a normal RPi 4 <24 Watts with a sata drive and dual 2.5GBit network and HDMI full size.
I didn’t get it for running nodes, but it will do it nicely when network is live
I think I have a power meter laying around somewhere so perhaps my project for the day will be to run 1 or perhaps all 5 of those through it and see what I get.
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Same with anything else, so not relevant to power usage of the box. I’m not sure about load differences (Pi-0-2’s are ~3W max) and older thin clients are maybe dual core CPU’s that at base level probably use ~15W and that doesn’t include the power of the other components, including the much larger PSU. You stack a few of them together running continuously and you have a heat problem that then requires the power of an air conditioner to move the heat out.
So adds up. Also space considerations – I can tape ten Pi zero’s to my wall and done. Maybe you have a large cooled space, but I prefer small, lower power and tidy.
Consider that heat output also incurs a cost for cooling as well.
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You can tape 10 pi zero’s to your wall but you’ll also have 10 brandless chinese subpar inefficient usb firehazard adapters to power them.
Just counting the cpu’s (not even the overhead of the usb adapters and the usb network card), you will use 30 watts, to get 2480 points in the passmark cpubenchmark:
That’s less than 1x the weird little box that @neo is talking about which scores 2963 PassMark - Intel Celeron J4125 @ 2.00GHz - Price performance comparison
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And lets not forget the 11 port switch needed. WiFi doesn’t really cut it for this sort of network work with 10 devices on the one AP
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Oh btw another tip: Gigabyte BRIX. They are very low power, and the newer models can fit both an m.2 sata / nvme and a 2,5" sata laptop harddrive.
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Nice. The Odyssey also has one slot for a M.2 nvme and one slot for a m.2 sata. So you get similar and it fits in the optional aluminium case you can buy for it.
But running a SSD and Sata (3.5 inch) for under 24 W, well way under, is pretty good in my eyes.
Although if I wanted to run just one RPi worth then yes the RPi would be a reasonable unit with a SSD for size and WiFi would likely work OK if only one ot 2 units using WiFi
Only if you have air conditioning. I know that’s the case in a lot of houses in the Australia and the US. But here in the UK it is rare and a few extra Watts of heat output in your living room or wherever is a benefit for about 9 months of the year!
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Lol ! Fireplaces are so 20th century, gather around the server with the whole family !
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I think you’re overestimating most of my friend’s and family’s willingness to have anything extra in their house that looks like a computer! Small as possible and unobtrusive has the best chance of acceptance. Some would call this hypocritical because they seem to have all the space and time in the world for guitars and Land Rovers.
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It’s not going to be a pretty sight with raspberries with cables coming out on all directions either.
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No, I will not. 
I suppose some may fall for such junk, but I will likely use a larger single PSU and attach the wiring myself - no USB.
The Pi zero 2 has built in wifi and I plan to use microSD’s (not the best option maybe, but tidy) so I don’t think I’ll need to use USB cabling at all.
As for CPU perf. This is a non-issue I think. The bottleneck is going to be my Internet connection by a large margin. I’ll have to see if I can even run 10 Pi-0’s without taking up too much of my bandwidth - this will be after I pay more to get rid of my current bandwidth limits, so can’t say for sure, but I still want some spare for personal use.
I don’t know about that - firstly, not sure if ten might be overkill for my inet connection in the first place. But can cross that bridge when I get there. Also already have the switch in my stash of old hardware, just don’t have the proper cable adapter for USB type c to ethernet --which would be the real cost here I think and why I’m hoping I can get away with wifi. wifi doesn’t have to be the best as the bottleneck is the Inet connection.
Sure. I think, from what I recall about where @Josh lives (a sweaty southern state), he most likely does - unless I’m thinking of someone else.
I think the limiting factor for the Pi-0’s is likely gonna be RAM … unless I use a RAM disk, but that’d really slow it down, so don’t think that’s reasonable maybe. So there will be a hard limit on number of nodes I can run on one - much lower than on my everyday old-reliable 4 core with 24GB of RAM, but this box is an energy hog and I want to get rid of it next year. Even if I can only run 30% the number of nodes I’d count that as a win powerwise.
OTOH, maybe my next computer upgrade will handle everything from normal usage to many nodes and I could skip the whole Pi-0 adventure.
I’m a bit confused here. The rpi zero needs usb-c power as well as far as I can tell and I don’t think you can just strip a couple of usb cables, twist them together and make a 1 plug feeds 10 diy cable…
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Only power and Ethernet. SSD will be in the case. I’m hoping the device will just sit there for a long time untouched and not need a keyboard and monitor plugging in for admin very much at all.
I’m not totally ruling out these HP boxes or similar but the RPi seemed to fit the requirements I have a lot better at the moment. I will get one of these HP things. I like the price point and availability.