? Debian on dual-socket Xeon server hardware

[zxcvbob <zxcvbob@charter.net>]

Geeks.com has refurbished 1U mini rack-mount servers, about 5 years old, 
for cheap enough that I want to get one to play with.  Two 4-core Xeon 
processors (do not support hyperthreading) and either 4GB or 8GB of RAM, 
a small hard drive, RAID controller, no sound, and very low-end 
integrated graphics.

Is Debian an okay distribution to run on something like that?  And which 
flavor, AMD64?

Don't ask me what I'm going to actually *do* with it when I get it up 
and running, I just want to see if I *can* get it running and stable, 
with Linux and maybe a spare XP Pro (32-bit) license I have.  Then run 
Seti or protein-folding workloads on it until I get bored and move on to 
another project :-)

Thanks,
Bob