what machines run freebsd

[BSD baby]

> The only advice I have gotten so far is to avoid AMD because most
> of the board testers use Intel.

Oh that's ridicuous.

We're running about 20 FreeBSD boxes, both servers and desktops, 
under heavy load (20,000 unique users a day on a MySQL-driven dynamic
site), fileservers, RAID, firewalls, mailservers, everything.

ALL of it on AMD Athlon CPUs.  Never any hardware problems.
Regular consumer AMD Athlon motherboard, CPU, RAM, with good hard
drives and Intel ethernet cards.

Don't let anyone scare you away from AMD CPUs.