The i3 looks a better buy than the AMD from Novatech, looking at the
barebones.
I bought the ebuyer zoostorm Intel 6300 for someone, it was cheap and fast
and Debian went in with no problem. A bit noisy. Very good value though.
For someone else, what is wanted is a quiet and not huge desktop,
aesthetically reasonable. We are probably going to get the steel
Silverstone matx case from Scan, the one that is called something like
Evolution and sells for about 45.00.
Then we will get a couple of quiet fans from QuietPC, and a Nexus 430 psu,
and do all this with the matx i3 mainboard bundle from Novatech which has
onboard graphics including vga and dvi. I am expecting this to be very
quiet. Not sure whether to use the stock Intel cooler which Novatech
supplies, or to go with a Scythe lower profile cooler in the interests of
getting the noise from that down. Probably the Scythe. This will come in
at not much over 400.
The compact Novatech i3 is a contender here too, except noise would
probably be higher, and cooling less good, than with the silverstone case.
I do think Intel has it over AMD at the moment.
Its a great pity that we lost Komplett. You could specify exactly what you
wanted, starting with their stock models, and a couple weeks later, it
arrived all connected and tested. I got someone a Core 2 system with
silent graphics card just before they stopped selling. It used a Gigabyte
Triton case, and you have to look to see if its running.
Peter