Gref

I'm wanting to build a linux box and I can either use my dad's old P4/Intel 865 setup w/2GB of DDR-400 RAM

Or I could build a super cute-n-tiny Mini-ITX Linux Box:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813153154

Seems pretty cute but I'm curious how the VIA chips perform with only 1GB RAM under Fedora and a really sad Video chipset lol.

mazza-

first of all, what is this server going to be serving?? you've provided no information on that front so i don't see how we can help you here, i would say buy that small itx build for energy savings, but that depends on what it is that you are serving. if you are serving some heavier applications like gaming servers or backups of information, whatever you are hosting on that machine we need to know as we can't tell you if what hardware you are aquiring is what your server needs.
fedora or a server version of a linux distro such as redhat will work fine with 1GB ram and a " really sad Video chipset" but again - depending on what this machine will be serving it may or may not be sufficient.

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Gref

File Server/Gaming Server/Possible HTPC (Haven't decided on that yet)

I'm wondering if it'd be much better than a P4 @ 2.8Ghz - 3.2Ghz, 2GB DDR-400 and a GeForce 7600GT

killnine

Def. not as good on the graphics front. Dont know much about the C7, but if I ventured a guess, I would say its not gonna hit the performance of a P4. The very fastest C7 out there is 2.0Ghz, I think. I dont know if these guys are dual core, but it looks like this is meant to compete as a cheap Ion platform, for media serving, you know?

Will work fine for files but game serving, I dunno. Depends on the game...

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BigpoppaFrary

Depends on what kind of chip you will drop in it.

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mazza-

what games are you going to be serving in specific, requirements vary wildly, so we need to know exactly what hardware you can use (or equivalents) and what software you will plan to run on there.
if it is definetally going to be running game servers tha i would suggest going for the P4 @ 3.2GHz and a 7600gt as this will at least be good enough for games.
but once again - what exact hardware can you drop in this, and what is your budget for buying extra parts (if any)

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the_beast

Performance is a tricky one to quantify with the C7 chips. Clock for clock, raw performance is about on par with a P3. But they do have hardware encryption, which means they can compete with the fastest i7s when it comes to encryption. It all depends what you want to do (VPN use? - try the Via).

I would doubt the Via would be able to run your game servers though, and as a HTPC it will also be pretty lacking. They make excellent routers & file servers though, although the networking hardware is a little lacking & on Mini-ITX the expansion options are limited. If you can move up to a Flex-ATX Via iDot board you can get a decent NIC in the PCI slot & a RAID card in the x16 slot for a great, low power fileserver. Still not much use for game serving though, although if you can live without the RAID card you can throw in gpu & it makes a good HTPC. Best of all is that they are REALLY cheap (although sometimes hard to find).

The options are endless, it really depends what you are looking for the most (size, cost, processing power, etc)