Hardware opinion (project / rendering server)

Dear all,

I'd like to extend my hardware setup. At the moment, I am using my "old" Mac Pro (see signature) to edit in DR. However, I also like to use the possibility to run it on my MacBook Pro (i7, 2.6 GHz, 6 core, Radeon Pro).

Therefore, I am planning to set up a project server. I read that a Mac mini is recommended. However, I am looking for a cheaper solution and was thinking of an Intel NUC (i3, 3.0 GHz) - so something in between a RPi and a Mac mini .

Now, I asked myself if it is worth investing more money to have a rendering server, which is more powerful than my MacPro (and better in terms of ventilation than my MacBook). I'd like to run my project server headless with a linux distribution (CentOS or Ubuntu) and have the following questions:
- Can I run DR17 headless from command line WITHOUT an additional license (was promised by Blackmagic in the forum)
- Does the plan above makes sense - an Intel NUC running on linux will, as far as I understand, not have any GPU support and all rendering relies on the CPU. Can it outperform my Mac Pro? Output codec will be h264, input XDCAM or AVCHD
- Does the answer to question 2 changes when installing Windows 10 Pro on the NUC which has Intel Iris graphics? I read (somewhere..) that in this case, the GPU can be used by DR

Thank you for your opinion, best
Christian

DR needs a good GPU, without it it's useless.
And then, for the codecs you are using and the kind of output, a Mac mini M1 will outperform your Xeon CPU in the MP since they don't have hardware de- and encoding, while the M1 is very capable in that regard.
I have no idea how far BM got with a headless version.