The real solution

The real solution

What I put together just recently.

motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E168131...
cpu:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E168191...

Then I used a huge Scythe tower-style heatsink to keep that cpu cool without making noise. And as a bonus it supports the VT extensions for when I want to muck around with Xen on it.

I realy wanted to get a AMD machine, but the fact that Via motherboards are getting old and Via hasn't released much new lately their stuff is getting dated. All that is realy aviable is ATI or Nvidia motherboards and I realy realy realy have NO desire to own another nvidia motherboard (which I quickly sold to a windows-using friend as soon as I got it), and I expect that the ATI stuff is even worse. I'd realy like to have a nice Tyan motherboard (which have excelent linux support) but it's outside what I can afford for a personal computer.

So that was a huge turn off for me.

So I think for a budget workstation this intel stuff is great. Everything worked out of the box with Debian Unstable. Debian stable installer didn't have drivers for the network stuff.

Sound worked. Network worked. Video works. Sata works (with SMART support with unstable kernel!) No binary-only drivers. No screwing around. Even sensors worked great with only having to run the sensors detect script. No sign of flakiness.

I don't like a lot what Intel does. Their firmware licensing for the wifi stuff is irritating to be sure, for example.

Intel-based motherboards just realy have a very high compatability with Linux, from my experiance. I am quite happy about it despite the second-class cpu. (which itself, being dual core, is so responsive and fast as to be almost too much for a Linux desktop)

Get around a 10msec latency with jack my Audiophile 24/96 audio card with the stock kernel and no xruns. I haven't tried a low-latency kernel yet, but I can't imagine.