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