When the first dual-core Intel's came out, they had some big issues. All of the review sites dumped on the Intel Pentium D805 product. It was way too power hungry and didn't perform well. The AMD Athlon chips were the winner.
Well, Intel was already working pretty hard on the Intel Core series internally and they knew that this stopgap was going to be a billion dollar mistake. Intel can take that kind of a hit since they have 100's of billions in the bank.
Well, not too long after that whole series of press stunts, Intel dumped the Pentium D805 on the market at super low low prices. The really interesting thing was that you could overclock the chip and get super stellar performance. The reviewer sites loved this and so did the enthusiasts.
I had my eye on this, but I didn't get too excited. I promised myself that I wouldn't build another system again. Lo and behold, though, a Fry's add appeared in early 2006 that had the Pentium D805 in a combo with the ECS RC410L motherboard for something like $125 ! Wow. I had to have it... and now I do.
Overall, the board is awesome. No complaints other than the lack of DVI out for the video. I chose Linux as the OS as I didn't want to waste the CPU power on windows. Only a decent Unix would be able to take advantage of that kind of a system... and I had some ideas for some CPU bound tasks that would be excellent. I ran Ubuntu and a few other Linux distros on the board. The only problem was the video. The onboard video is not really great at OpenGL. It is equivalent to an Xpress 200 ATI card. I recommend getting a cheap Nvidia card for Linux OpenGL.
If you have any feedback, please send it along.