In Proxmox they have VirGL-GPU and Virtio-GPU. They allow VMs to pass work to the GPU without being dedicated to one VM. I don't think gaming was the intended use case and don't know what kind of performance you would get. My uninformed guess is that it would not be great.
Yeah this is the answer. I was about to list off some movies but realized I actually watched and finished those. I couldn't even bring myself to finish anything after Endgame besides the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
My recommendation for that price range is to buy a used business-class laptop. Emphasis on the business-class. These are the Dell Latitudes and the HP ProBooks. Try to find something less-than five years old (businesses tend to phase out older laptops in the three or four year mark). Buy from a reputable re-seller that offers support in case you get a lemon.
It won't be the fastest or sexiest laptop out there. But it will be long lasting and reliable.
Build something that you want. Find that niche that isn't well served by existing projects and fill the void. Either by making something entirely new or adding a feature to something already out there.
I spun up a trial version of Windows Server and tried to get it working. It seemed to want a Domain environment and I didn't want to go down that road. There probably is a way to do it without setting up a Domain but I didn't feel like messing with it at the time.
He probably has an additional MSO because of some event in career. Certain schooling and assignments may incur an additional service obligation. The Army wants to avoid spending a lot of money on training its officers only to have them immediately drop their REFRAD paperwork.
I bet manpower costs are significant as well. How many people are needed to run this thing? You probably need engineers with an esoteric set of skills to put it back together and manage it which would not be cheap.
Edit: I looked it up, it is running SUSE Enterprise Linux, so maybe management isn't as specialized as I expected.
They have a pretty good catalog of pre-built Docker containers. You don't have to use their version of things but there is a lot of software that I was previously unaware of that I learned of through them.
In Proxmox they have VirGL-GPU and Virtio-GPU. They allow VMs to pass work to the GPU without being dedicated to one VM. I don't think gaming was the intended use case and don't know what kind of performance you would get. My uninformed guess is that it would not be great.