experiences with Dell PowerEdge1850 or PE2850

[Vincent McIntyre <Vince.McIntyre@atnf.csiro.au>]

Hi list,

I am looking for anyone who has had experience with this hardware,
successful or otherwise. These machines come with Xeon cpus that
have the EM64T extensions turned on.

Red Hat lists them as fully supported by RHEL3, so I assume that kernel
support exists for the various devices inside. However I'd really like
to hear from Debian users who have had success with this h/w.
(http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/?pagename=details&hid=5673)

My questions are these:
 * can these run ia32 binaries without modification (a la AMD opteron)?
 * I understand there is some support for them appearing through the
   amd64-xeon subarch; am I right in assuming this for a "pure64"
   execution  environment?

I did look in the list archives, but I couldn't see these particular
machines discussed.

Any information gratefully received
Vince