Now, before you rush out to buy, check eBay to see if you might get a great price. You just might be happily surprised. By the way, my server machines are Intel and ASUS based.
Personally, I always build my computers with Intel motherboards and Intel CPU's. Over the years I have found various compatibility issues using others so I stick with Intel. I've found Intel's customer service to be excellent, also.
Ditto. If you were writing software what would you debug it on first? The industry standard? Yes. Other bugs may never be fixed. I had experience with a non-intel mobo and non-intel processor, some stuff did not run on it.