AMD all the way! And actually I prefer the nforce-it was quite easy to set up. Also it looks like the combo you selected compares quite well in price with what I've seen.

One thing you may want to take note of is that there is no line-level out on these boards. Dunno about you but for me that was a real letdown as I connect my pc to an f.m. transmiter. I don't have anything to connect to the S/PDIF.

There is now the gpl'd forcedeth driver for onboard nforce network. Kano made installing the graphics driver very nice and easy too. I have never had a VIA chipset so I can't honestly say one way or the other. Some friends swear by them.

The second pair of USB ports doesn't work. Maybe an IRQ conflict. I haven't really put any effort into resolving it as I have only 1 USB device.

I haven't done anything in the way of oc'ing yet but here's where I'm at:
Temp.= 27.0, 28.0, 0.0; Rot.= 4440, 0, 0
Vcore = 1.70, 1.70; Volt. = 3.39, 4.95, 11.55, -16.19, -6.12

That's using the Gnome desktop, running a web & mail servers, XMMS, 3 browsers, irc, the GIMP, and 6 or 8 Konsoles. The CPU is twidling it's transistors waiting for something to do. Of course a G of RAM doesn't hurt either! On that note...not sure how familiar you are w/ pc's but make sure you know what you're getting before you buy any RAM.

I have 2 fans in the power supply, 1 case fan and a coolermaster hsf combo on the cpu itself. Nothing fancy or expensive there at all. OG has some good advice in the post you mentioned about oc'ing. I think the silver paint is a good idea- and would recommend just doing it from the start and having it done. Don't skimp on the power supply. That's often a common cause of premature death for many things electronic.

All in all I am thrilled w/ this box and the only thing that didn't work immediately was the onboard video but as I mentioned installing those drivers is a snap. It was a totally painless experience. It also runs windows in vmware rather well. gluck