I almost feel embarrassed asking this, but I'm building my first home server, which I hope to be the only one I build for a really long time. Going to describe my use case and want to know if I'm buying too much CPU.

I plan on running a lot of services, likely in containers, so my initial goal was "lots of RAM, plus plenty storage for family photos, and is pretty quiet" so 32 GB RAM plus lot of SATA drives, and NOT a rack form factor (despite having a rack switch, security camera storage, etc).

I lost the plot on CPUs when multi-cores became a thing and you couldn't just compare hertz to hertz. So we're talking early 00s lol.

I guess transcoding a couple videos occasionally for streaming might be nice, but it's not a must have. I know I could add a dedicated transcoding server if I needed later. But Netflix, Disney, Youtube are more than enough for my family while my kids are little. I got out the buccaneer business a long time ago.

Long and short, after watching a couple server build videos (old enough that their parts aren't available, so I can't just copy them) from guys who thoroughly explained their reasoning, I landed on an ASRock motherboard with 8 SATA ports and IPMI that supports the Xeon E-2124G 3.4GHz.

Now, cost savings isn't terribly important to me, but I don't want a hot server with fans screaming to stay cool or just heating up the closet it's in like crazy. And for environmental reasons, I'd like to not be using lots of electricity to do nothing.

Is the Xeon stupid to base my server on based on my needs? Is it ridiculously overpowered for my stated use case? I'm not going to be gaming, and I don't expect to run any VMs, just containers. Jellyfin/Plex, Gogs, Jenkins, some sort of Google Photos clone, maybe a local Bitwarden instance that won't accept any connection outside my LAN. That kind of thing. No gaming, not ripping and compressing fifty BR videos to distribute on Usenet, etc.

Edit Also, I'm really happy with my router, switch, and network video recorder (for security cameras), so I don't need a server that can do these tasks. Not looking to use pfSense or anything.