Is a ZIMA Board 2 + RTX 2000 ADA the cheapest path to a decent Qwen-3.8 27b self-contained endpoint?

I just watched a YouTube from Luke’s Dev Lab where he literally just plugged a RTX 2000 ADA Into the side of the Zima Board 2’s PCIE socket and it just friggin worked and had great token speed despite running on shitty Ollama. Ran off the Zima’s power supply and everything.

https://youtu.be/Lb3sRFTA-hk?si=8S8vv4GD1zVPeTrc

The Zima Board 2 is only like $411. It has like 16GB RAM and 64 GB eemc storage, Sata ports, Ethernet, yada, yada.

https://shop.zimaspace.com/products/zimaboard2-single-board-server

an Nvidia RTX 2000 ADA is like $700 and has 16GB of VRAM. $1100 for both seems like a great entry point for having a fully functional Qwen 3.8 27b endpoint running at a decent tk/s.

Is this the cheapest and best-performing self-contained entry point for local AI or would a baseline (pre order) Mac Mini M5 with 24GB be a better way forward. Seems like the RTX would still edge out the M5 Mac for prompt processing speed but you do get a much better actual computer in the Mac.

Are there any cheaper fully self-contained alternatives that offer fast token speed on a decent size model like Qwen 3.8 27b?

I’m focusing the discussion on new systems you can buy or preorder now and not used systems. I’m sure there are great deals on used Macs out there, but I want good prefill speeds.