This is my ROM of preference... it's fast, free of clutter and htc sense services running in the background and eating up memory, it's really stable as well.
no bloatware whatsoever, ROM is just 70mb, dont forget to download the GApps zip (google apps) or you will not have market, gmail, maps, etc...
there's many versions of the snap kernel, but 7.6 is definately the best... it's really fast and smooth out of the box, and offers great battery life. it comes with a feature that u can choose to activate if u like, TURBO. it improves I/O performance and makes your phone score 2500 in quadrant. although that necessarily translates directly into real life performance, it does make the phone faster, and does not affect battery life. It does not require any partitioning of your sd card either.
all you have to do, is bea able to live without sense, which is not that hard anyway, as there's many replacements for widgets and stuff. the only thing is that 4g, hdmi, and fm radio dont work (though the cyanogen team is working on this, and might be implemented in the next release)
if you have anymore questions ask away, im sure someone here will be glad to help u!
ENJOY!!