After looking at the parts available in my country, I was greatly disappointed. Most of the parts I listed (the list, previous post, was done a many months back, just before I decided to put the project on hold), has been phase out and no longer selling here. Of course, there is always the option of shipping from overseas, but the shipment fee quoted busted the budget. And more bad news, it seems that DDR3 RAM prices have nearly doubled since I last checked. :(
Luckily, the only thing I have to hunt is the Motherboard/CPU. Here are what I decided so far:
Casing: Fractal Design Array R2 (+300W PSU)
PSU: Nil
Memory: 8GB DDR3 Kingston 1600MHz (cheapest)
This time round, I decided to change the approach a little. Instead of trying to lock on to the CPU then motherboard, I decided to search for any ITX motherboard with 4 or more SATA ports on the list of available parts from my area, then compare the prices.
After some searching and some comparison, my chosen motherboard is ASRock FM2A85X-ITX with AMD A8-5600k processor. The motherboard has 7 SATA III port, and is an unlocked processor. Some may wonder, the processor is rated at 100W TDP, that is not so green isn't it? Well, this is the cheapest CPU/MB combination that fits my requiremnt and is an "unlocked" processor, which I hoped to underclock/undervolt it to minimize the power usage. Online review suggested that at idle, the processor draws around 20 Watt, a little undervolting/unclocking could reduce the power usage. That is basically the rational behind why I bet on this CPU/MB combination. It could really turn out ugly on the "green" criteria on my list.
Backup plan? Turn it into a home server. Haha. It is a quad core processor after all. Or I could just sell it. Well, we will see how things go.
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