Anandtech has been around for over a decade, and they are one of the most thorough and respected sites around. They do this stuff for a living, so if they say there's a problem, I'd belive there's a problem. They set out to benchmark these boards and some didn't last more than 2 seconds with a 125W ...

The 320GB are 15,580 yen (3Gb/s sata2) or 15280 (1.5Gb/s)
which is approx 138 usd, 110 eur, 183 aud 76 gbp 155 cad at current spot rates.

Quoted prices in Japan are supposed to include 10% consumption tax, and I think akiba watch generally includes this.

You should be able to boot the computer fine without a graphics card of any kind, depending on the bios. A socketA board I had boots fine, I just had to change the setting 'halt on all errors' to not 'dont halt on any errors' . The computer might beep a bit on the next boot up, but linux didn't have...