Seems like an expensive option, what with the DDR5 and all that. And $409 for the board?
Sure, done, almost a year ago even.
The Supermicro X12STH and X12STL have been available for about a year, are rack-optimized (front-to-back airflow, etc), DDR4, ... with the
Xeon E-2324G being sold at CDW for $277 and a 65W TDP, so $380 for the X12STH totals about $657 for a low end solution. You can also toss an 8-core very fast E-2388G (95W TDP) on there instead if you can use the compute for something like ESXi.
Of course it doesn't. TDP doesn't mean the number of watts that the CPU burns. It doesn't even really mean the number of watts the CPU *can* burn, but rather what the environment must be able to dissipate.
See
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/intel-xeon-quick-sync.107239/ etc for some details on idle power utilization.
From my perspective, I'd rather pick up an E-2388G with 8 cores/16 threads/5.1 GHz turbo and 95W TDP rather than that E-2324G from above, because the E-2388G can do so much more. Power consumption isn't just about the CPU, but also about the constant draw of other components such as memory, fans, PSU's, mainboard, etc., so finding a way to run other workloads shared on the platform is a HUGE win for power efficiency if you can do it. That's going to be where the X12ST boards really shine compared to a repurposed suboptimal workstation board.