I cannot reccommend AMD enough. I've had a Athlon1400 for the past 4 years or so, and it's still outperforming most of the lower-end pentium fours. Now I have a nice shiny new Athlon64 3000+, and it's really nice and fast. If you want to get an opteron, I'd really reccommend, if you have the money, the Tyan S4882UG2NR K8QS PRO Quad Opteron/SCSI/SATA/2GL/SSI MEB Motherboard. It's obscenely pricey, but it could power your entire enterprise and participate in compile farm events at the same time, with power to spare. If you really want obliterating power, go for one of the boards that supports the dual-core opterons. AMD really had fun with their dual core, look at http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485,00.html for proof. I'm not kidding, you're gonna get a whole heck of a lotta bang for your buck, even if you're only running a single dual core opteron. Load 'er up with about 2GB ram, a couple SATAII drives in RAID 0+1 mode, and you've got the dream server right there. I'm really not joking. the only problem with 64bit is that amd64 debian support is still hiding in the testing/unstable areas, so you won't find any "official" release, which means you have to dig a bit, but it's there. I really hope you choose AMD, because they've done so well for me... I even have a Intel machine (pentium M 1.0 GHz, 256mb RAM) that was absolutely obliterated by my 1400... I can't say enough for AMD. You'll certainly get your money's worth if you buy AMD. If you like, just gimme a price cap and I can go hunt for the precise hardware you'd want. I'd even offer to build it for you, but you'd have to be nuts to trust a total stranger like me :)
I hope you find a solution soon!
