On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 05:28:27PM +0100, mick wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jun 2014 12:48:18 +0100 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk allegedly wrote:
Assuming I do upgrade the mobo, what chipsets should I be looking for? Host O/S will be Ubuntu (14.04 64-bit).
Again, that depends..... :-)
I'd probably go for the H87 chipset. Not as full featured as the Z87, but then at the pricepoint you are thinking of (and the CPU) I'd guess you aren't that interested in overclocking.
Ebuyer gives the following options for socket 1155
http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=intel+Socket+1155+motherboard
and this article explains the difference between the chipsets
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Z87-H87-H81-Q87-Q85-B85-What-is-th...
and of course wikipedia gives some useful detail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155
My understanding is that the B and Q series chipsets are aimed at business use whilst the H and Z are aimed at domestic use. So for example the Q series chipsets offer active management technology which is useful to a business, less so for a home user.
A major factor is power supply efficieny of course. In particular efficiency at the (hopefully low) power that you will be using most of the time. A 500 watt power supply may advertise 90% efficiency but that will only be when you're using, say, 350 watts. If you are using only 30 watts the efficiency will likely be very poor.
I have an efficient 80 watt power supply on my system (the desktop that draws 40 watts), 'ordinary' power supplies use significantly more power running this system.