I am not an expert in database servers but I know 2 or 3 things about 'commodity' PC hardware. If you want to build a server by saving money on hardware, don't.
Go and buy a 2nd hand AS/400 and put Linux (or *BSD) on one of its images and that's something that will work essentially forever. Or buy a Sun and do the same. Or buy a good name 19" server for rackmount and as above. RAID is not snake oil and the bottleneck is often not the disk subsystem, but the network and stupid programming that has algorythms running in O(n^n) (either time or space, or both) whenever minimal constraints are even approached (like doing a SELECT * on a 30 million records table with 2GB of ram and then doing an outer join or intersect on that so the pain becomes really palpable - and *then* for good measure expect a PHP4 backend to handle the resulting 1 million record table in reasonable time by using a cursor on the data monster to serve the result as web pages - this is how 'programming' is being done now). Afaik the fastest servers (including Google and many others) do not use SQL for anything. An optimized hash table (tiered etc) should work much better than any SQL.
The engineering of consumer PCs is not suitable for server services. It is not a x86 vs. RISC question, it is the whole thing. Most supercomputers are x86 multiprocessor monsters now. The x86 is a nightmare dinosaur from the era of steam-powered wooden chips but it is the de facto standard. This is IBMs fault (did they have to open source a PC with a c**p CPU and a c**p operating system bought from someone who did not own it yet ?! - oh wait, *that's* why they PD'ed it).
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