I looked at desktop systems for some long while. None really do the needful very cheaply. I wanted to do PCI passthru at least and run a few more substantial vms. This meets the requirements and had pretty much everything
Looks like it was never powered on, not a spec of dust inside. Swapped out the supplied windoze disk with another SSD and so far, XCP likes it very much. I am very impressed with what I obtained for ~$1500 with tax.