Even though the motherboards are the same, there is a part of me that wonders if there might be a subtle difference between using those two CPUs. I've seen too many weird weird problems in the past. I am extremely cautious about this. For critical systems I always reccomend buying two identical motherboards just to be sure that if it dies a good and exact replacement exists.. I even look at revision numbers on asic's to be as sure as possible. I've "been there" just enough times to be paranoiac about this.
Sometimes it's not just rev numbers on chips but different chip vendors and different part numbers altogether. I've opened up hard drives with the same part numbers on the outside to find very different armatures and other components on the inside.
More likely to be a problem is that 100% identical hardware can have different BIOS and firmware revisions.
If the hardware has ISA cards then there's the possibility of a different OS version changing those too.
I don't understand why the different CPU might be troublesome - kernel
and userland are built on one specific cpu and used on other same-arch cpu's all the time.
But chances are good the OP will have a trouble-free experience, providing disk geometry isn't a factor.
-f http://www.blackant.net/
