Today is stay calm Thursday, and especially stay quiet Thursday. Progress with the 8IK1100 is surprisingly easy. It ate 2.4.22 suffering only the loss of one of its pretend processors no doubt this will be fixed by some or other HT patch, and the ITE RAID chip while it comes from a company who seem to have no clue about HTML (try getting to that page from their front page), comes with complete data sheets errata and a Linux source code driver - so far so good we'll see how it does under pressure. It appears there is also a dual PSU, 1000Mbit Ethernet version called a GA-8KNXP, which sells for 163, and a SCSI version for 270 of your earth pounds.
GRRR it appears that between Revision 1.0 and 2.0 of the GA-8IK1100 they removed the 40 pin IDE sockets for the RAID controller. So I can't test the RAID controller. The 8KNXP does still however go in for this whole quaint idea of having connectors thing. So expect some info about that, when I order one later today.
Benchmark results are in and the 8IK1100 does a little less well than I expected, clearly dual channel DDR is as good as RAMBUS was. All in all the 8IK1100 looks like a very good work station machine.
Ahh it turns out HT processors are enumerated by ACPI, not APIC - I smell a plot against lysdexics.