New motherboard advice?

[shmeeter]

So, not really a gentoo question, but I figured this would be the best place to go.

I'm thinking of building or buying a new desktop, and I want to make sure everything will work nicely with Linux. Maybe that's not as much of an issue these days? I haven't bought a computer in about 6 or 7 years, so I'm pretty out of touch with current tech. My current machine has PCI and AGP,and that's about the level of my expertise.

My budget is about $1000? Maybe 1200 if it turns out sick. I'm only worried about the box for now, or even just the board/CPU/RAM, not monitors, keyboard, etc.

For my degree, it would be nice to get something with many cores (parallel scientific computing). Each core doesn't have to be blazing fast, though. I do play some games once in a while, and I want to mess with CUDA, so a nice nVidia card is pretty much essential.

Question. What's really the difference between a "server" board and a desktop board? And the diff between Xeon and Core, etc?

So, is this budget reasonable? Got any board, cpu, RAM suggestions? Think dual (or more!) slot, 4 or 6 or 8 or... cores each, many gigs of ram, and the CUDA card (or 2?).

Oh, and I want to build something approximating a quiet PC. I'm willing to downclock, I'll hang hard drives, stuff like that. So if anybody has any advice on quiet hard drives, fans, cases, etc, that would be appreciated, as well.

My instinct is to go with Intel for the motherboard and the chip, because their documentation has been so good in the past, and I figure I'll have the best luck with underclocking if I want to mess with that. I've always liked the Intel/Linux combo. But no Celerons, etc., please.

Thanks a lot!
shmeeter

[StringCheesian]

If you want one of Intel's most recent line of processors (codename Sandy Bridge, released last month), wait until this hardware bug is resolved before you buy a motherboard:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20326
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_bridge

These benchmarks test Intel's latest processors on Linux:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_corei5_2500k&num=2

But keep in mind the "Core i5 2500k" in that article is Sandy Bridge - wait for debugged motherboards.

[The Doctor]

you might like the price on the amd cpus. they are about $800 cheaper.
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Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.