Hi Joseph

It depends on what you define as stable - I've been using ASUS based
systems for several years now and I've found them rock solid on a 24x7
basis. Like any PC they need a bit of a look over once a year or so - a
good blow out to get dust out the fans and vents and a rubber eraser on
the card and memory connectors, that kind of thing.

ASUS does however have a bit of a reputation for 'alpha' quality BIOS
code and the Athlon systems are really power hungry - I had a 250W power
supply for an A7M266, with no AGP card to load the power supply so I
thought the 250W would be enough, but the board would not boot from the
IBM IDE reliably. I had about a 20% chance to boot successfully. Once the
box booted though it ran fine, so the power supply was tricky to
diagnose. Anyway, bumped it to a 400W and all problems went away - and
made the box sound like a vacuum cleaner, sigh.

As for non-x86 systems, they seem to be better engineered, since they are
generally more expensive and have a bettter design budget. But then you
need to hang on to the box a long longer to get value for your buck. So
while I'd love to have a nice G3/G4 for NetBSD, I can probably buy 2 or 3
upgrades for my AMD PeeCee NetBSD box and track the speed and code bloat
curve a bit longer.

Good luck and please tell us if you do find the ideal hardware - I'd be
keen to switch :-)

--et