This company has some *KILLER* Alpha boxen, they have enough horsepower to blow away *ANY* PII,PIII box on the market. And the kicker is, that they use industr standard peripherals! Standard PCI Video cards, SCSI controllers, standard DIMMS, standard USB stuff... My Alpha board is very similar to my fiance's ASUS P2B Intel based board.

Now I think you should check on that CPU fan thing though. Mine has a honking HUGE fan on it! And, well... All CPU's use IRQ's, it's just up to the BIOS/Operating System, as to how they are implemented. You are correct in that my board assignes an IRQ to a slot though, not a peripheral.