Thanks. It looks there are reasonably priced mini-ITX boards that support Skylake Xeons (a note to this that are considering this: v5 E3 (Skylake) use the same socket as Cores, but need a different chipset).

The 80W TDP worries me about though, cooling, noise and money/pollution wise (the extra 45W make around 400kWh/year).

Considering the CPU will be idle most of the time, do you have figures about the actual idle consumption of an E3 based machine?

There are also lower TDP models like http://ark.intel.com/products/53401/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...

My home server with a Xeon E3 1240v5, 5 3.5" hard drives, one SSD, a SAS HBA and a small discrete GPU idles at 71W as reported by my UPS. I haven't made any special effort to optimize power consumption yet.

If you end up buying high TDP chip, you can simply cap the clock either in BIOS or in kernel to save power.