Makes sense, but to be honest, not sure if you guys have seen the prices lately, a lot of HQ rack servers out there for cheap, I'll probably stick with the processors and get a smaller 32GB ram version per your advise (I know it's probably still overkill), you can easily get one of these for a couple of hundred bucks.
Besides, I'll probably run some sort of IPS so since everybody's saying it's gonna use up a lot of CPU, I guess I'd rather be safe than sorry.
For the switches I guess the Cisco 2960 looks good. Might try that myself and prices are ok. Though I have to ask, how come you're not able to get 100 mbps over 100 mbps link if your server is under utilized? What's the bottleneck holding it back?