Off-Topic Thread V3.0

BloodBath

Hmm that could be an option down the line. Not right now.

Would I be able to cram all those drives onto b450?

How many PCI lanes do I have available? 16 for the gpu, 4 for the nvme leaves how many for sata or sata cards?

4 of the 6 board sata ports should work at least right? I'd also need a games drive. I suppose I could use the raid array for that as well.

Is it possible to stick ssd cache on top of the raid array then as well or would that even be worth it.

savemejebus

BloodBath wrote: »

Hmm that could be an option down the line. Not right now.

Would I be able to cram all those drives onto b450?

.

What about x470? X470 gaming Plus max isn't much more than the tomahawk.

z0oT

BloodBath wrote: »

Hmm that could be an option down the line. Not right now.

Would I be able to cram all those drives onto b450?

How many PCI lanes do I have available? 16 for the gpu, 4 for the nvme leaves how many for sata or sata cards?

4 of the 6 board sata ports should work at least right? I'd also need a games drive. I suppose I could use the raid array for that as well.

Is it possible to stick ssd cache on top of the raid array then as well or would that even be worth it.

All Ryzen CPUs (not APUs) have 24 PCIe lanes. 16 for Graphics usually, 4 for an NVMe drive & 4 for the chipset link. All of the SATA drives will come from the 4 lanes feeding the chipset.

In terms of bandwidth with X470/B450, 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 is 32Gbps (8Gbps per lane). The peak theoretical throughput of 4 SATA 3.0 drives would be 24Gbps (6Gbps per drive), so you would be able to saturate all 4 drives at once no problem.

If you went to 6 SATA drives (X470 would be required), you're up to 36Gbps for all the drives where your chipset can only work at 32Gbps. So you wouldn't be able to saturate 6 SATA drives over the 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes that B450 or X470 has. You would need X570 for that, where the chipset speed is doubled to 64Gbps from PCIe 4.0 (much greater than the 36Gbps required for 6 drives).

Do you really need to saturate all 6 drives at once though? It's probably not really possible in practice either.

Also, if you go with B450, you'll really only have 4 SATA ports available to you, given that's all the B450 chipset has natively. Any B450 motherboards with 6 ports usually disable the M.2 slot to get the extra 2 ports meaning you can't populate all 6 SATA ports and use the M.2 at the same time.

If you want more than 4 SATA ports & to use the M.2 coming from the CPU, then you'll need an X470 or X570 board.

Cuddlesworth

BloodBath wrote: »

Is it possible to stick ssd cache on top of the raid array then as well or would that even be worth it.

For your use case, probably wouldn't be worth it. Even the NVME cache. I mean 250gigs is what, 10 files cached if your lucky. A large spinning platter array would be better as others have said.

jebidiah

Looking for a recommendation for a second monitor. Currently have a 144hz 1080p TN panel. Would mainly be for productivity (college, family member occasionally working from home). Should I just get some generic 1080p job or could I get a decent IPS second hand or something?

Budget around 80-100

Cuddlesworth

jebidiah wrote: »

Looking for a recommendation for a second monitor. Currently have a 144hz 1080p TN panel. Would mainly be for productivity (college, family member occasionally working from home). Should I just get some generic 1080p job or could I get a decent IPS second hand or something?

Budget around 80-100

Cheap 1080p 24 inch TN panel.

jebidiah

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Cheap 1080p 24 inch TN panel.

Define cheap?

Cuddlesworth

jebidiah wrote: »

Define cheap?

A good price point for cheap monitors was in the post above mine.

deceit

With all the talk of raid, would anyone have a recommendation of a low profile 12-16 port raid card for my server. I misplaced mine.
Or even 2 8 port ones if they are good bang for buck.

TitianGerm

Will be moving my PC into the NZXT H500 in the next two weeks or so and want to change my CPU cooler at the same time.

Was looking at the Be Quiet Dark Rock 4

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BYP9S95/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_3vNyEb341P1H7

And the ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07MJGNJB3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_LxNyEbQGCTCFB

Has anyone experience with either? I was also looking at a Noctua but I've promotional credit with Amazon and can only be used on items sold by Amazon so not sure if they'd be worth paying the extra for?

BloodBath

I'm ordering that Arctic for my own build.

Seems to be 1 of the best price/performance coolers on the market and a fair bit better than the likes of the 212 evo.

Fairly solid review here.

elbyrneo

I have a 24inch acer xf240h monitor. Its 144hz 1080p, about 2 years old. I find it great to be honest.

With all this working from home coronavirus stuff my work has given me a 200euro subsidy for pc equipment. Thinking I'll get a 2nd monitor.

I game a little but my self build from 2017 is prob 1080p at best perhaps (ryzen5 1600, gtx1060 6gb, 16gb RAM)

Dont want to spend more than the 200 euro subsidy- recommendations for a monitor?

Minimum 24inch, 27inch would be nice too
. 1440p if budget and my specs could stretch?

Thanks a mill

TitianGerm

BloodBath wrote: »

I'm ordering that Arctic for my own build.

Seems to be 1 of the best price/performance coolers on the market and a fair bit better than the likes of the 212 evo.

Fairly solid review here.

Brilliant thanks for that. Very reasonable at £35.

iLikeWaffles

deceit wrote: »

With all the talk of raid, would anyone have a recommendation of a low profile 12-16 port raid card for my server. I misplaced mine.
Or even 2 8 port ones if they are good bang for buck.

How do you misplace a server?

wotzgoingon

iLikeWaffles wrote: »

How do you misplace a server?

From what I gather from his posts he lives in Germany and Ireland. So maybe from moving around so much things got misplaced.

BloodBath

elbyrneo wrote: »

I have a 24inch acer xf240h monitor. Its 144hz 1080p, about 2 years old. I find it great to be honest.

With all this working from home coronavirus stuff my work has given me a 200euro subsidy for pc equipment. Thinking I'll get a 2nd monitor.

I game a little but my self build from 2017 is prob 1080p at best perhaps (ryzen5 1600, gtx1060 6gb, 16gb RAM)

Dont want to spend more than the 200 euro subsidy- recommendations for a monitor?

Minimum 24inch, 27inch would be nice too
. 1440p if budget and my specs could stretch?

Thanks a mill

If you want 1440p for a secondary then you can't go far wrong with this for the money. 95hz, freesync/g-sync, 120% SRGB, 95% DCI-P3 colour range, 10 bit IPS panel.

I have 1 myself and it's the best budget 1440p monitor on the market imo. You would have to use parcel motel to get it delivered to Ireland though. It was about €220 delivered to my door.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TXHBWMK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For gaming your current PC might struggle a bit without lowering settings a fair bit. Something like a 1070/1080/2060/5700 is ideal with it though.

This is a review of practically the same monitor. Same panel and stand but a US version under a different brand name.

-edit- Didn't see that it was unavailable atm.

elbyrneo

BloodBath wrote: »

If you want 1440p for a secondary then you can't go far wrong with this for the money. 95hz, freesync/g-sync, 120% SRGB, 95% DCI-P3 colour range, 10 bit IPS panel.

I have 1 myself and it's the best budget 1440p monitor on the market imo. You would have to use parcel motel to get it delivered to Ireland though. It was about €220 delivered to my door.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TXHBWMK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For gaming your current PC might struggle a bit without lowering settings a fair bit. Something like a 1070/1080/2060/5700 is ideal with it though.

This is a review of practically the same monitor. Same panel and stand but a US version under a different brand name.

-edit- Didn't see that it was unavailable atm.

Thanks a mill for that.

It's available from march 20th on https://www.laptopsdirect.ie/electriq-27-qhd-1440p-95hz-freesync-hdr-monitor-eiq-27mq95fshdru/version.asp
It's an IPS monitor so would be better as a primary work monitor than my current TN screen too.

Will have another scan and order that if nothing else more readily available. Will think about a graphics card upgrade too, maybe second hand.

Thanks again!

Kimbot

iLikeWaffles wrote: »

How do you misplace a server?

From the post I assume he lost the card and not the actual server :P

deceit

Kimbot wrote: »

From the post I assume he lost the card and not the actual server :P

That's true, it was only the raid card, also what wotzgoingon said is correct I live between Germany and Ireland so travel a lot (Driving 1700km tonight between the 2 Hamburg - Dublin with a slight detour along the way I will be bringing a lot of electronics with me quite often).

z0oT

I've been playing around with Ubuntu Server 19.10 in a Hyper-V VM on my server the last few weeks. I've finally got it to the stage now that I've mastered my media server setup - Plex, Tautulli, Sonarr, Radarr, Samba shares and automated backups using rsync & systemd timers.

I'm running Windows Server 2019 currently and while I quite like it, it's too expensive & I don't really want to run it unlicensed (Currently using the 6 month evaluation license). This has me thinking of going back to a variant of Linux on my server.

I think once the Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS version comes out I'll make the jump. The only stickler will be migrating the 17TB of media from NTFS to EXT4. Another thing I'm not sure of is whether I'll install a GUI or not.

I had some issues with Debian 10 when I tried it last year (a lot probably my fault), but Ubuntu 19.10 has been working just fine.

ED E

Would you not stay virtualized for future flexibility? Storage and Hypervisor only on the bare metal.

z0oT

I'd probably rather go down the road of docker containers than using VMs everywhere TBH.

That's a learning curve I haven't navigated just yet. For the moment, my plan is just to install stuff on the bare metal and see how it goes. Hence my preference for the LTS version.

AlmightyCushion

z0oT wrote: »

I've been playing around with Ubuntu Server 19.10 in a Hyper-V VM on my server the last few weeks. I've finally got it to the stage now that I've mastered my media server setup - Plex, Tautulli, Sonarr, Radarr, Samba shares and automated backups using rsync & systemd timers.

I'm running Windows Server 2019 currently and while I quite like it, it's too expensive & I don't really want to run it unlicensed (Currently using the 6 month evaluation license). This has me thinking of going back to a variant of Linux on my server.

I think once the Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS version comes out I'll make the jump. The only stickler will be migrating the 17TB of media from NTFS to EXT4. Another thing I'm not sure of is whether I'll install a GUI or not.

I had some issues with Debian 10 when I tried it last year (a lot probably my fault), but Ubuntu 19.10 has been working just fine.

Is there a specific reason you need to move the data from NTFS to EXT4? Ubuntu can read and write to NTFS.

z0oT

I'm aware of that but in the past I would have noticed the ntfs-3g driver doing some funny things, like causing Windows to want a chkdsk or file permissions being messed up. This is over 10 years ago though.

I have some very specific NTFS permissions set up, like Plex having read only access to all of the media for instance. I think a Linux filesystem with Linux is just a safer bet to implement the same without issues.

TitianGerm

What do people use to remove the old thermal paste when changing the CPU cooler?

TitianGerm

TitianGerm wrote: »

What do people use to remove the old thermal paste when changing the CPU cooler?

Isopropyl alcohol.

TitianGerm

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Isopropyl alcohol.

Is there anywhere handy to order a small bottle? When I google it everything local seems to be 500mls and I won't need that much.

mp3guy

TitianGerm wrote: »

What do people use to remove the old thermal paste when changing the CPU cooler?

I borrowed my wife's nail polish remover (pads) before. #yolo

Ultrflat

TitianGerm wrote: »

Is there anywhere handy to order a small bottle? When I google it everything local seems to be 500mls and I won't need that much.

Chemists will sell it to you, you may need to explain what its for.

iLikeWaffles

TitianGerm wrote: »

Is there anywhere handy to order a small bottle? When I google it everything local seems to be 500mls and I won't need that much.

That 500ml bottle may come in handy for other uses, I'd order 2 if I were you!!