In early 2007, I bought a new system to replace my 1 1/2 year old biostar iDEQ. The system I selected cost about $610 plus shipping and includes:
I've called the new machine "tall", because it's much bigger (and particularly taller) than the case of the machine it's replacing. I keep typing "tree", though, so maybe I'll change the name to satisfy my fingers.
I've completed the OS installation and started the process of moving files and services from the old server. Right at the moment the system is running memtest86, which I will let it do for at least 18 hours or so. After that I plan to run OpenGL programs and CPU-intensive programs to continue the "burn-in" process. While I could presumably move the hard drive from the new machine to the ideq (they're both amd64 systems), I would prefer to be confident that the new system is stable.
I'd like to have all services moved to the new system by the end of the weekend, but I suspect I won't meet that goal. (hah! I missed it by years! It's 2009 and services are still running on the machine it was supposed to replace.)
The Ubuntu live/install CD only booted in "Safe Video" (VESA) mode. After installation, I disabled the bootsplash in menu.lst and installed the nvidia closed-source driver. Now, video works including accelerated OpenGL. However, there are occasional glitches in the display on a VGA monitor. They last for a short time (presumably 1 refresh) and seem to be composed of white pixels for 1 or 2 rows of the screen. Without removing "splash" from the grub configuration, I got a corrupt display when switching to text mode or killing the X server. The "nv" driver didn't seem to work, so you may have to choose between using an unacclerated driver or a closed-source one.
All the other on-board devices seem to work. I have not tested the Firewire ports, however.
The machine benchmarks 10% to 50% faster than a Sempron64 3000+ (1.8GHz) in sequential tasks (gcc file.c), and 100% to 150% faster in parallel tasks (make -j2). For example, compiling emc2 with "make; make clean; time make -j2" takes 106 seconds on the sempron but only 49 seconds on the Athlon 64 X2.
Unlike on the ideq/fc4, CPU frequency scaling works right out of the box. It's nice to see the speed stay at 1GHZ most of the time, but spring right up to 2GHz when I run something processor-intensive.