The fan is pretty quiet, so I wouldn't worry about fan noise in your equation.. With respect to which EPIA board - I have been happy with the performance of all of the ones I've used, but I wasn't doing particularly compute-heavy operations most of the time. For instance, I have a voice recorder/sampler/looper application that serves 4 people at the same time from a single EPIA board, and has no trouble (on either the 1.5Ghz board, the 1.2, or a 1.0) - but when I tried to run two instances of PD that were each doing multiple partitioned convolutions (I think 8 partconv~ objects in each patch) it started to have trouble on the 1.0 board. In general, linux and PD run well on the VIA boards. If you want to do any graphics though, you will absolutely need to install the VIA-specific graphics drivers, otherwise it runs really clunky. Actually, for whatever you're doing, using the VIA drivers is probably a good idea, to get the maximum HW utilization.