Intel introduced the low-power, affordable Atom chipset a couple years ago. The earlier models included the Atom 230 and 330, running single and dual-cores, respectively, at 1.6 GHz. Frugal with power at 8 watts, it could even run 64-bit. The first-gen Atom motherboards/chipset kits had two chief weaknesses: they maxed out at 2 GB of RAM, and they used RealTec network-interface cards (at least the Supermicro mboards did). RealTecs sometimes crash Linux when the incorrect driver loads, and the RT NICs don't do jumbo frames. The crashes are patchable but it adds a couple hours to your install. (Do not, repeat not, buy the old models no matter how cheap they are. Stick to the D510 series.)
Intel has since released the Atom D510. The processor is up to a 13-watt draw, runs at about the same speed, and still runs 64-bit. What makes these chipsets better is that they max out at 4 GB of RAM and use genuine Intel Gig NICs that are widely supported and can run jumbo frames. This is a big leap, because the configured price of a fully-built mini-server around the platform remains the same. Supermicro has some great Atom motherboards that can support a home or small office doing various things. (The D525 has since come out. Compare the two here.)
Newegg has some good deals on the Supermicro Atom Rack Server and the tower server for about $70 less. Or you can just buy a motherboard and roll your own. My tower server with D510 runs just under 40 watts with 4 GB of RAM, CD, and hard disk.
What can you do with it? There are a number of Linux and BSD appliances that are free.
1) Run your own telephone switch. FreePBX is an awesome, OS-included version of Asterisk that has a clean web GUI. PBX-In-a-flash is based on FreePBX but has a few extras (nonstandard enhancements like dial weather by airport code and dial your local tide schedule) thrown in. Why would you want to run your own PBX? You can do stupid phone tricks, like really cheap phone service at $.01/minute and $1.50/month per number with Vitelity, for one. Or your own conference line. Or your own trunks over VPNs to other offices. Or just blacklist phone numbers and send telemarketers to their own voice-mail hell.
Keep in mind that to light up your home phone lines, you may need an additional analog card from Sangoma or Digium. (FXS and FXO are different, but can run on the same card.) Once you figure out how cool SIP is, you'll want to replace your house phones with SIP phones. However, you can get started with SIP free using the Xlite soft phone. The iPhone/iPod/iPad version is $7.99. It's perfectly true that you can make phone calls cheap with a Linksys PAP2T or Vonage, but if you're a telephone control freak and want to wage war on telemarketers, Asterisk is for you.
2) Run a great firewall like pfSense. It's based on FreeBSD but has a great Web GUI so you can avoid learning the subtle differences between BSD and Linux. pfSense comes in embedded and full. For the Atom server, running the full version is no sweat. And I run SNORT inline on two interfaces with no issues. A full SNORT IPS signature subscription for home use is just $30/year. And pfSense does not just IPSEC point-to-point VPNs, but also WebVPN. Try that on your Cisco ASA 5505, and you'll be paying a couple grand for the equipment, licenses, and subscription. Check out the plugins for pfSense and you'll see how much you can do with one small box. pfSense 2.0 is almost out of beta and there's a 64-bit version. (Plugins include FreeSwitch, an open-source competitor to (open-source) Asterisk, so if you want, you can even run a PBX on your firewall.)
3) Storage: Run FreeNAS and you'll be able to scale reasonably out of the box. The Atom Motherboard has six SATA slots and two GB NICs that do jumbo frames. Hello iSCSI. With 2TB disks, that's 12 TB of storage. FreeNAS offers CIFS (Windows), Apple (AFP), iSCSI, and NFS mount points. Add a serious SATA RAID card to get even more disk IO performance out of your little Atom box. Obviously, I would recommend the tower server case for FreeNAS because it has room for more disks.
4) Run Apache/PHP/MySQL applications. Run Fedora, CentOS, whatever. You can run your own apps at home on top of your favorite flavor of Linux/BSD. One of my favorites is Gallery2. There's even semi-free apps (free for no enterprise features) like Movable Type (you're reading this on an MT platform), and even run more than one on the same mini-Server.
5) Collect data. Run a weather station. Run a log server. Run a crazy blog and see who hits it with which keywords. Collect IPS events from multiple firewalls and correlate them.
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