I am after some advice on a miniITX board for my file / print /media server. At the moment i have an old ATOM board installed in a Fractal R2 mini NAS case (so i am limited to a 350W PSU, without upgrading the that as well) I am running 4 hard drives I have been considering upgrading to something like an AMD A4 5300 FM2 chip to give the box a little more poke (doing file conversions etc), but i cannot find a miniITX FM2 board for sale anywhere (everywhere is out of stock) My other alternative was a i3 chip, but the boards and chips make that solution way more expensive. Any recommendation to companies selling AMD boards please, or a different solution? (I have also considered a HP microserver, but i cannot find any reviews that tell me how much faster the N40L (or the newer N52) chip is over my current ATOM) Thanks in advance.
Another question i have just thought of. I am currently running Vista on the server as i had spare copy. Would i see any improvement if i switched to Microsoft HomeServer?
You could go for a Celeron or Pentium CPU and save quite a bit of money there. Performance is just as good in most purposes as an i3. I have H67 with a G620 for my server. It does what I need it to. If you want to keep your current set up and get more performance, have you considered using linux or bsd instead of Windows? Using a much lighter os would certainly be of a benefit.
MSI do a fm2 mini itx board, its called a msi-fm2-a75-is e53, can't link on my phone. It is available in the UK at scan and there is also a fm2 mini itx board by Asrock.
Thanks for the input. Im not good with Linux and too be honest just need it to work (i have a Raspberry Pi to play with Linux when i get 10 minutes) Ill certainly look at the Celeron / Pentium. Forgot about those I have searched for the MSI board and the AS Rock, but they appear to be out of stock, which is the issue i have.
OcUK have the ASRock in stock but it's pretty pricey in my opinion. OcUK also have a pretty good range of mini-itx 1155 boards too.
