Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I’d like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I’d also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
That’s going to be noisy as hell.
Uses way too much electricity.
$400 for that seems steep. Go look for an HP Z440 workstation as cheap as possible and upgrade it. A 12 core E5 v4 cpu is literally $5 and you should be able to pickup a chassis with cpu and like 8gb ram for ~$120. Then for $10 a stick but as many 16gb ddr4 ecc dimms as you want.
For $400 or less you could get 12 much faster newer cores, a basically silent workstation that idles under 100w and 192gb ddr4
Despite what other people are saying, the noise on these depends on your bios settings. If you set everything for high performance, it’s going to be loud. I’d start off with the energy saving settings until you decide you need more power. With mine set to energy saving, because it’s honestly more power than I need right now with 16 cores; 32 threads; 176 GB RAM and (4) 6 TB hard drives for storage (not including boot drives), the server is actually very quiet. It’s quieter than my PowerConnect 6248P POE switch. I’d say it’s a great server for starting off with if you can get a good deal on it. I run VMWaee ESXI with multiple virtual machines, TrueNAS; pfSense; Plex; VMWare VCSA and a couple of others for just playing around with different operating systems when I need to. Even with power saving settings, I have no performance issues with anything I do as a home server. Now, in a production environment, data center, corporate server running critical tasks, I would never choose power saving settings. But for most people, it’s not likely you will need the full performance of something like this in a home environment. And, if you start using more of the processor, or have it in a room that’s not air conditioned on a warm day, it will automatically increase fan speed as needed anyway. Not that I recommend a room without temperature and humidity control of some kind, but it can handle it to an extent when not in a live production environment.
Check the processor generation for H.265 / HEVC compatibility, I had an older HP G8 and it needed to fire up 20+ cores just to transcode a 300Mb anime