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If you are sensitive about the Intel Management Engine, the original Core 2 Duo/Quad systems are the last where it could be fully disabled.
Anything later will forcibly shut down after 30 minutes if (at least a fragment of) Intel's closed & bug-ridden monitoring code is not present.
I ran me_cleaner on a few of these systems, and I do all my finances with them running OpenBSD (usually on q9550s).
Yes, this effort to run old hardware is worth it for me. Below are the bios images that I was able to produce:
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/233
The mainline kernel works but I think the linux-surface kernel (https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface -- I misnamed it in my previous comment) should be used. I accidentally booted one of the SP3s with the mainline kernel and saw some WiFi driver problems, though I can’t say I’ve tested this extensively.