SilverStone SG05-LITE: Building A Low-Cost, Linux, Mini-ITX System

The motherboard I went with for this Linux system was an ECS H61H2-I3 motherboard. This motherboard supports Intel "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge" processors and uses the Intel H61 Chipset. It's a very basic motherboard and nothing too special, but it runs fine with Linux and my needs weren't too specific with just tossing this system into the benchmarking test farm for constant execution of tests. This motherboard sold for under $50 USD.

The processor I went with for this build was an Intel Core i5 3470 "Ivy Bridge" CPU. The choice to do an Ivy Bridge build for this system basically came down to having lots of SNB/IVB CPUs still left laying around and with most of the new benchmarking being focused on Haswell and newer, I settled for an Ivy Bridge system with the i5-3470 as a decent mid-range CPU with nice HD Graphics.

The system memory used for this system was a Kingston DDR3-1600MHz 4GB module. There wasn't much reasoning behind this besides the Kingston KHX1600C9D3B1/4G module being quite cheap though generally I would have preferred going with a dual channel kit, etc. For the purposes of this system though a single DIMM is sufficient.

The disk drive used for this system was the recently reviewed Western Digital WD10EZEX -- it's a decent one terabyte hard drive for just about $60 USD.

Assembling the system was a breeze and when firing it up it worked fine with Ubuntu 13.10 on the Linux 3.11 kernel. Given its an Ivy Bridge system with an Intel H61 motherboard, even older Linux distributions should play nicely too, but if wanting maximum performance and the best Intel HD Graphics experience, you will be wanting to run the very latest kernel, Mesa, and other components. Stay tuned for benchmarks from the system in the coming days. Overall I am satisfied with all of the components selected and hopefully this information was useful if you're after building a low-lost, mini-ITX Linux box.