Great post by Chris, he does mention one thing I forgot:
"(bought cases with lots of fans from rackmount.com)"
My SMP box has three case fans (it came with two), plus disk coolers for the two fast SCSI disk. Noisy as hell. I don't care, it's downtown, not in my house! Fans are something too many people ignore, aggressive cooling can really increase reliability and extra fans can save your box when (as is inevitable) a fan dies. If you only have one fan, and it dies, you're in trouble.
I don't think you can buy i820/i840 with the MTH (SDRAM) anymore, Chris's experience is why Intel recalled all i820/i840 mobos with the MTH and shipped folks boards with RDRAM (including people who bought from sources other than Intel). Manufacturers should only be offering RDRAM solutions - which are still expensive (around 2-3x the price of PC100 at the moment). I was warned off MTH+SDRAM solutions before the MTH bug and subsequent recall event, because their performance sucked compared to GX boards (even with expensive RDRAM, GX boards stack up very well), so I managed to avoid Chris's negative experiences with such boards. Chris has my sympathy, Intel really screwed up.
I've never used the Intel 810-based board Chris mentions, but my linux development machine at home is built around an equivalent SuperMicro 810E board (the 810E supports 133MHz FSB Coppermines as well as older Katmai PIII and non-E (100 MHz FSB) Coppermines), and I've been very pleased. 810E and its replacement, the 815E (supports PC133 memory, 810E only supports PC100), both have integrated video. My linux development machine is "headless" (I have an X-server on my windows box) so I only needed bare-boned video in order to install linux. The integration saved me $25. If you're building 1U boxes like Chris, more importantly it saves you a slot for a video card.
The gamers who run most hardware review sites loath these boards but they're great for building a cheap, reliable machine if you're not planning to devote your life to playing Quake on it. These boards only support socket 7, not slot one, though - Celerons, Celeron IIs (Coppermine core), and Coppermine FC-PGA packaged PIIIs (up to about 733MHz are available in socket form, I think, at the moment). The socket configuration helps keep the resulting machine tiny and tidy.
