I am undertaking the task of building a personal server which more or less emulates the type of environment I use at work. In this stage I built a small system from the Intel 330 BOXD945GCLF2 motherboard. This is a dual core hyper-threaded Atom chipset that looks like a quad core server, only at 1/4 the wattage, and about 1/3 the CPU crunch power. But it’s still looks and feels snappy enough.
I’ve currently loaded OpenSolaris as Solaris is a mature OS common in the IT world which also is very well tailored to mutli-core CPU’s.