it makes sense that it would be a good benchmark but..
i tried mandrake, red hat 9, suse, and college before resorting to knoppix. none of those distros would install properly. im sure that MAYBE with a lot of tweaking i could have gotten it going, but i have neither the time nor the linux knowledge to do that. Knoppix works perfectly on my system but all other distros i have tried do not. Im sure this is rarely the case, but it is possible that you could check out a pc with knoppix, have everything work fine and then try to install redhat and have it not work.

i figure its probably a good idea to try it, but a better idea would be to build a custom machine with hardware that has been documented as working flawlessly with many distros. this is what i plan to do when i get the money, since i feel it is the only surefire way to get it all up and running easily.