Very nice! I don’t find this a one up but I love the ingenuity. I managed to salvage this NUC from work because we shut down a zoom room from a agency we acquired at work and then disposed all the unneeded /nonuniform hardware. Before that point, I was looking at doing something quite similar to you.

I also had to use get an hdmi dummy plug. That was an annoying stumbling block. Just, why??

I have an i7 NUC that I use as my jellyfin server cause it has hardware transcoding. It absolutely rips and takes up less electricity at full bore than my gaming desktop at idle. I agree that there’s a place for mini computers, but it’s probably not serious gaming.