As much as it pains me to say it, run windows; the drivers get borked too often on the linux side for mining software.
I used HP SL250 blade chassis when I ran a mining and GPU compute hosting solutions; I actually donated my old personal blades to the makerspace.
We removed the shrouds on the Reference version nvidia cards so we could force air across the fins through the chassis properly. Most GPUs assume a flow from the intake of the onboard squirrel cage fan and out the back. Reference edition cards are great for this because the heatsink is oriented along the horizontal axis rather than the vertical.
NiceHas was run as-is with the full benchmarks done. Run as-is.
For Ethereum, we used NanoPool or similar with Ethermine, and setup a Telegraf+Grafana dashboard to calculate statistics and track progress. However, for a single unit just run the mining software directly as it won’t be worth the time investment.
IMHO, this isn’t worth getting into unless you just want a say in the network as a learning thing, it’s not going to be a profitable endeavour on that scale operating at a home.
When we had desktop / open air builds (which we stopped because they aren’t really that profitable for what you invest in it), we used the higher-end Celeron processors since they had enough PCIe bus lanes on the die, but didn’t draw much power compute wise.