Home server challenges - Special Motherboards

My home server has, for a few years been a basic C2550 Atom board, but as with many tech things I longed for a little more power. 

I chanced upon a thread on STH which described a weird motherboard that was selling on ebay.ca, it was for a board with two nodes on one board and they were Intel D-1541 (8c16t) and had dual 10G SFP+ per node. So they are quite powerful.

I bought one, paid my dues (duties) and installed it in the case. They aren't easy to use because they have no GPU and the BIOS is very exotic (exposing every possible parameter in meticulous detail). The boards also have no PCIe slots, only M.2 and OCP slots, and the OCP slots are backwards! (they are backwards because they were designed for M3008 SAS/SATA controllers instead.

I got Proxmox working fine on one node and eventually on the second node, but ultimately, I decided I would search for something more practical. Eventually I found a deal on a D-2143 which is slightly better but only a single 8c16t board. It has PCIe slots and SFF-8347 SAS connectors, everything you could need.

The board arrived... and upon testing was DOA! Damnit. So off that goes back to the seller. Now, I've found another deal, I am working my way up the food chain here, it's an Intel E-2247G which is also 8c16t but peaks at a much higher peak GHz and has Intel UHD 630 GPU.  So, now I await delivery... Three motherboards in a year? What does 2021 hold.