Oh wow, thats odd about the SATA driver... mine worked without any issue right off the live disc and the installed system. I enabled AHCI in the bios and the system did not give any complaints.

The 4x graphics slot does not bother me, though. The SuperMicro board looks rather nice as well but I was not ready to spend that much money on memory... I wanted at least 4GB of ram. The bill for mainboard/cpu/processor came to just under $400

With 8.10 Alpha 3 you get support for the ICH10, but not working video. I'm currently downloading 8.10 Alpha 4 and that uses the same xorg that they use in the review. I'll post here when I try Alpha 4.

The Phoronix reviewer (Michael Larabel) had to compile xf86-video-intel DDX, Mesa, and DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) code from the respective git master branches. We may have to do the same.
This is what I am worried about. As an ex-Gentoo user I'm still getting used to Ubuntu differences, but I royally screwed up my first two attempts at installing trying to get the 2.4.0 binary video driver working right and don't want to hose my machine to where I have to reinstall yet again.

I'm willing to wait for now until the updated packages are in repositories, however if I can find a guide at compiling the Intel/Mesa/DRM drivers I'd be willing to figure it out.