The system came today. I can't figure out how to get the cover open, although I haven't tried very hard. It would not boot Windows from my USB CDROM (bad media?) but it would boot from a USB flash drive, so I installed Debian with the xcfe desktop. Had to install it twice because I didn't realize why fsck failed the first time. Hardware real time clock was slow by more than 24 hours. Second time it failed I found the problem, set the clock in the BIOS and tried again. Came up just fine.
I also installed the Boinc client and am running the IBM's World Community Grid project to let it stretch its legs. It is running 8 tasks at once like it's supposed to, so Linux must recognize all the processors. I ran the boinc benchmark and it came up 1728 floating point MIPS and 9479 integer MIPS per processor. I don't know if those are good numbers or not.
The fan is obnoxiously loud, but not as bad as I expected. It seems to be a 2-speed fan, and I have it in "workstation mode" which I guess is supposed to be quieter. Boinc has been running with the preferences set to allow it to use 100% of all the processors for a half an hour now, and the fan hasn't kicked in to high speed yet.
I found a Sapphire Radeon 5450 graphics card on sale last week for $35 with a $15 rebate and I couldn't pass that up. That's a good price even if the rebate turns out to be a scam. It's not here yet, but I'm not ready to install any options anyway (did I mention I can't get the cover open?). I also ordered a $2 USB sound adapter -- how bad can it be for $2 -- and some USB motherboard cables from dx.com
I also need to hook up a USB wifi adapter and see if it can use it (I have several already) I don't have a proper Ethernet cable running to that location so I have a long one strung across the room and under a door. Major trip hazard.