Building hardware is always interesting and somewhat challenging as the rate of development of new products makes it hard to keep track of the best selection. After wondering between different specifications, I decided to acquire the following hardware:
- Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe, 192 EUR
- Chipset: Intel Z77 Express chipset
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3550 3.3GHz, 218 EUR
- Memory: DDR3-1600MHz Kingston 8 GB x2, 116 EUR
- Power: Corsair CX430, 50 EUR
- Case: Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced Mini-ITX, 45 EUR
From the past, I have several hard disks to spare since I cannot seem to get rid of the old ones when I need to change them from somewhere. Most of them are used as external drives and contain something important. It took a while to clear them, and now this barebone has three hard disks.
The metadata left on the 3.5” disks from them being used for RAID-1 in 2008 was still there, and the system recognized them as such. It took a while to clear that information…
Anyhow, now the system is running with Ubuntu Linux 12.10 x64, and I am still waiting to get the Blu-ray optical drive which was ordered at the same time with the other hardware, but the company (verkkokauppa.com) seems to have some difficulties obtaining it:
Since I am a big fan of Qt, I want to try out Razor-qt as a desktop manager…