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Take a real good look at AMD's roadmaps:

Dual Cla-whammers are GONE.

AMD evidently decided to force the enthusiast/mini-server market to choose to buy-up ( dual sledge-hammers, and at the prices involved .. NBL ), or

buy-down ( Dual Athlons

Mean ( well, not really mean, but .. wahh!! . . ), but effective ( for their bottom-line ).

Mind you, there are 2 other significant concerns in replacing my system ( I'm in the segment they .. decided to ignore ):

1. Silent System: .. those Cla-whammer HSFs look huge/possibly-noisy, or, if the chips really are low-wattage, then they'll be really silent under a copper HS with a Verax.de fan on it, and

2. as someone else mentioned, HD CPU usage, but the solution for that ( waitaminit, we dissolve stuff to fix our PC's? ) is to use Serial-ATA ( non-blocking, and non-redundancy-of-commands ).
And with Linux, the Silicon Image chip based S-ATA controllers are supported in 2.6, so grab these, then, rather than the non-open-source HighPoint, or the outright opposed-to-open-source Promise.

Lost Circuits Benchmarks ( stunning ), and CyberCPU.net ( it's the low-CPU, 8% vs 44%, that puts S-ATA into the phenomenosphere ), and .. I'd heard that Seagate is implementing out-of-order-execution for its upcoming S-ATA drives, which oughta make 'em punchier..

( for the TLA-challenged, the CLA in Cla-whammer, the new AMD desktop chip, stands for the Canadian Luge Association, and if these chips are able to flatten luge , they're damn capable, and..
the above usage of NBL stands for Not Bloody Likely, as rememberers of the film-version of Pygmalion may remember.. My Bloody Fair Lady, I think it were callethed.. hmmm.. )

1. don't buy an Itanic, if you're going with Opteron for its ultra-fast RAM ( compared with Itanic ) and drastic cost-effectiveness ( ditto ), an Itanic won't show you whether Opteron'd be a good match: the architectures are totally different.

2. RAID storage: don't buy Promise 'raid' cards ( and DON'T do 'raid' 0/1, do RAID-5 ).

Why? ..
1. it ISN'T possible to use S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics in your drives with the Promise ones, at least ( you'll crash the PCI-bus, hanging, fatally, the machine, using Promise chips .. don't know about Highpoint or Adaptec ), and...
2. they oppose Open Source drivers, and coders, for their own products.

Highpoint has only SuSE 7.3-8.0/Redhat-whatever ( IIRC ) drivers for their fast 1520 cards, but if you want compute performance, you want Gentoo... ( and SuSE's been at 8.1 for ages, now... )

Adaptec? I don't know if their cards have the same issues as the Promise/Highpoint, but their cards compete with Promise's, and so probably cut corners in similar ways ( I'd love to see hard data on that point, though )...

3ware are the only cheap ( compared with SCSI ) RAID controllers I know-of, that offer bootable, real, actual, S.M.A.R.T.able RAID on ATA drives.

( I'd stick scads of 120GB IBM 180GXPs on 'em, because they're cooler-running than the 180GB versions, and better than most other drives: fast, quiet, reliable-looking, etc .. quiet means, to me, that wear&tear isn't happening as much, though I wonder-at the No-Seagate rule expressed earlier... is it that fluid-bearings fail soon? or that Seagate has worthless support from our perspective? )

3. SuSE or Gentoo are really your only choice, that I can see.

Why? .. 1. Redhat's trying to microsoft linux, by ignoring standards and making its way law, and Mandrake's .. a flaky ( though fast ) variant originally based on Redhat... I'm fed-up with both, but YKMV ( metric, here )..
2. SuSE includes damn-near every program-capability one could imagine, and has excellent hardware support ( beyond any others' )..
3. Gentoo's compiled specifically for the hardware you are running, and with --buildpkg you get to build on one, then copy all the tbz2's built, to all of the other ( identical ) machines, and just install 'em, and voilá: ultra-performance.

Misc Links:

Chassis, suitable for lots-of-drives NAS type thing.. or this one for well-cooled system ( thick aluminum's a good conductor of heat, and that makes for a longer-living, less-downtime machine )

I'd use Athlons, but that's just me ( Intel's murdered/crippled WAY too many CPUs, and chipsets, for me to be loyal to them ), and would use these HSFs with Verax.de ( or Panasonic Panaflo ) fans on 'em, just because the noise machines make increase sick-time and reduce health/sanity/productivity so damn much.

Consider using P/Ss like these, remembering that 1. they're REALLY quiet only when running at about 50% load, and 2. the UPS-VA-rating you need for each one is DOUBLE the delivered-watts rating of the P/S.
Also, you want LINE-INTERACTIVE UPSs on all machines. ( NO data-corruption due to brown-outs or other glitches ).

I'd consider dual-CPU machines standard for the desktop, simply because even if a CPU was saturated, on that machine, the machine'd still respond, and I'd stuff as much quick RAM into it as I possibly could ( 3GB/desktop, for engineers ), and I'd ALWAYS use ECC RAM.

Consider this board as something to compare against, with Something Like This KVR266X72C25/1G or this times 3 of 'em, per motherboard.

Like the Marines: Capability-based, not capability-choked, right?

The best advice I've seen on this page is

1. get a GOOD admin ( character, more than anything, values, sanity, cultural-harmony-with-you: you CAN change someone's skillset, you CANNOT change their nature ), and

2. metrics, understanding precisely what 'success' means, what the context is, etc...

3. do it one unit at-a-time

Oh, yeah, here's an Opteron-board news link... ( I'm waiting for lots-of-SATAs-on-board )...

Finally, change the ferro-resonant ballasts in your flourescent lighting to RF ballasts, and switch to Phillips TL-930 4' fluorescent tubes ( Colour Rendition Index of 95, rather than the cheap-cool-white CRI 50!! ), and your health will improve, significantly ( you can then ask for a raise, for your increased effectiveness, see )... if you find the warm-white of the TL-930s ( 3000K ) not brilliant/awakening enough, then mix-in a couple of TL-950s ( 5000K, mid-day-sunshine/sky colour ), to punch-up your alertness.

More info here

Also nice to note: Verax is still working on a kit, for which one of our main contributors lend them his G4. He says it is whisper-silent now. Hopefully Verax's solution will still be developed and maybe it will indeed make the mac even more silent than Apple's fix-kit.

-- Thomas De Groote, G4noise.com webmaster

From what I've seen, those YS Tech TMD fans aren't too great. They just spin too fast to be quiet. It's a shame, because the increased blade surface area should mean higher efficiency.

Anyway, the next-generation fans I'm truly drooling over are the ultra-quiet fans from Verax. A power supply with a Verax fan was a part of the Tom's Hardware Power Supply Roundup and they liked it a lot.

However, at $48.00 in the US for one of these babies, I don't think I'll be splurging yet. I thought I was nuts for buying 5 Papst 8412NGLs at $20.00 each.

Ian

Wtf, putting blinking LEDs in fans makes them "next-generation"?

The CPU fan I'm using right now is what I'd call next-generation. Why? Because it's actually quite silent. Go ahead and check out Verax (German only unfortunately). There's information on their fan design, including more detailed pics of different models. Verax uses a special fan shape to reduce noise, and, most importantly, ties the fan to the heatsink with a rubber connection, reducing vibration.

Replacing my old fan with one of those babies has greatly reduced the noise level of my box.

Wtf, putting blinking LEDs in fans makes them "next-generation"?

The CPU fan I'm using right now is what I'd call next-generation. Why? Because it's actually quite silent. Go ahead and check out Verax (German only unfortunately). There's information on their fan design, including more detailed pics of different models. Verax uses a special fan shape to reduce noise, and, most importantly, ties the fan to the heatsink with a rubber connection, reducing vibration.

Replacing my old fan with one of those babies has greatly reduced the noise level of my box.

It's a bit weird, it seems that Fortron is the maker of the PSU that THG refers to as the Verax PSU.

But just to make things harder they refer to it as a Verax PSU sometimes and a Fortron PSU sometimes so even the manufacturers seems to be a bit confused :-)

Verax has a list of vendors on their website (check the left frame for different countries)

I just did a quick check but some of the retailers they list had the FSP300-60ATV. Here is an example.

It's a bit weird, it seems that Fortron is the maker of the PSU that THG refers to as the Verax PSU.

But just to make things harder they refer to it as a Verax PSU sometimes and a Fortron PSU sometimes so even the manufacturers seems to be a bit confused :-)

Verax has a list of vendors on their website (check the left frame for different countries)

I just did a quick check but some of the retailers they list had the FSP300-60ATV. Here is an example.

It's a bit weird, it seems that Fortron is the maker of the PSU that THG refers to as the Verax PSU.

But just to make things harder they refer to it as a Verax PSU sometimes and a Fortron PSU sometimes so even the manufacturers seems to be a bit confused :-)

Verax has a list of vendors on their website (check the left frame for different countries)

I just did a quick check but some of the retailers they list had the FSP300-60ATV. Here is an example.

I have built two Spacewalker computers: the SV-24 and the SV-25. They match all your requirements, with the exception of "flat" (they are cubes).

They come with rather cheap and noisy fans. I replaced all of them with Verax fans for the case and CPU and a Papst fan for the PSU.

The SV-24 has a Cyrix 900 MHz CPU. I plan to try passive cooling, as this CPU uses only about 10 W and can take about 80 C, much better than a Celeron or Athlon/Duron. On the other hand, these Verax fans are so quiet that you do not hear them anyway, so it is somewhat pointless to remove the fan.

They look pretty funky, and are supposed to be about 19dBa!
Check out how it works here:
http://www.pcsilent.de/en/products/veraxcpu.asp

I just wish I could afford that price :(

German:
www.verax.de"
Translated to English:
www.verax.de - Translated Via WorldLingo