We don't often think of Kabini based systems lately, focusing on systems of significantly more power but it is worth remembering that the low powered AMD processor and motherboard combo still exists. The motherboard comes with an integrated A6-5200 with HD 8400 Graphics for a grand total of $68 leaving you short only a DIMM and storage device from having a fully functional system. You will not be playing Crysis on this system but if you pick up a low cost GPU you would certainly be able to play online games and older titles, if you wanted to go that direction. You could instead look at building a low powered, low cost system for Internet browsing and emailing for a friend or relative for very little cost, especially if you have an old disk lying around somewhere unused to install in the system. It can also manage decent encoding performance for its price, check out the review at MadShrimps to see more.
"The A68N-5200 board, by incorporating one A6-5200 Kabini-based APU, is bringing to the table even more raw performance when compared to its A4-5000, while the GPU component gets a 100Mhz boost. While the increased 3D performance is minimal versus the A4, other tasks which require CPU performance will get up to 25% performance boost."
Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:
- Asus Maximus VIII Impact (Z170) @ Kitguru
- ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Impact Review @ OCC
- MSI Z170A Gaming M7 @ Kitguru
- GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming 5 Motherboard Review @ Hardware Canucks
The Amazon link you gave is
The Amazon link you gave is for the older, passive cooled and slightly less powerful, A68N-5000. The A68N-5200 seems to be only available through eBay for now.
Performance is very close to an AM1 Athlon 5350 solution. The 5350 is overclockable (from 2.05GHz to 2.2/2.3GHz) but lower pricing on the A68N-5200 probably makes up for that.
Sorry about that, price seems
Sorry about that, price seems the same on eBay – http://www.ebay.com/itm/BIOSTAR-A68N-5200-AMD-APU-A6-5200-DDR3-Mini-ITX-Motherboard-/161896619272
Considering that AMD
Considering that AMD abandoned the AM1 socket and didn’t bring any Beema models to it, this board does makes sense, because of the pricing.
This would be a good board
This would be a good board for a small file server. It should be able to handle Plex transcoding for a single streaming device (at a time). You would just need a PCIe SATA board to get enough storage. From benchmarks I’ve read this would outperform the A4-5300 I’m currently using. My only concern is the little heatsink it uses, overheating could be an issue under heavy load and just how loud is that tiny fan going to be?
If the shipping was
If the shipping was affordable, I’d want to make this my pfSense box.