Mini PC's Worthwhile?

I've been having a look around at options for low powered fanless mini PC's. From a processing point of view the I5-8250U appears to be the best value for money (4 core / 8 thread), and up to 32gb DDR4 so could potentially be used as an EXSI/AHV/other host for running a few VM's whilst passing through hardware to run a media centre environment with free to air via usb/digital tv, and a NAS host with USB HDD's, etc….. Has anyone had any experience with these? Reliability? Better ideals / cost? Cheapest places to buy?, etc?