Amahi Forums

Hi guys,

I'm currently running an HP N40L, and due to storage, hardware and age, I thought I'm due an upgrade.

I'm thinking a Lian Li PC-Q26 for the case, between 8-16gb RAM - however, the part that I'm way out of touch with, is motherboard and CPU.

I find the N40L is rather slow when unpacking and verifying files, so a boost would certainly help.

So, looking for the following:

Mini-ITX motherboard w/ passive CPU that has at least 6 SATA ports, more would be beneficial.

I was looking at the ASRock Mini-ITX C2550D4I, but I can't find that in stock anywhere in the UK, does anyone know of anything similar?

Many thanks!

Alex

I ran Amahi for several years on an old 32 bit Dell, and only recently upgraded. I bought an Asrock j-3710 itx with 16 gigs of ram all for about $235.00. (Look for embedded solutions or SOC boards) http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J3710-ITX/index.us.asp

The board fit perfectly into my Dell case, so all I had to do was to plug in the cables. No other changes were needed. The problem I ran into was that I couldn't get Fedora to install on the system. I got an error message saying Fedora did not recognize my drives. I was able to get an old Windows install disk to recognize the drives, so I tried Fedora again with no luck. Next, I tried Ubuntu, and it installed flawlessly. Not sure what the problem with Fedora is. Could be the UEFI, or it could be something simple that I overlooked.

I'm very happy with the Asrock board. It's low powered, doesn't need a fan (though I'm using one anyway), it's quiet, and it just works. In my opinion, the SOC boards are perfect for basic needs, and mine has shown a significant improvement in speed compared to my old set up. If you go with one of the SOC boards, I'd recommend you go with a bigger processor (the j-37XX series) and max out the memory.

I also checked out lots of other board and processor combos. For the price, the itx SOC board couldn't be beat. The 2550 you mentioned is an atom, and even though it's not a bad setup, it's a bit timid. All of the AMD processors for SOC boards seem pretty weak, and might not satisfy your need for speed.