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WereCat
WereCat WereCat

My father is going to have 50th birthday and I know he wants a home NAS and maybe a nice wireless printer with it.

He is using Gigabyte Brix with Broadwell Celeron and slow 5200RPM drive and even browsing is slow as hell.

I already know which CPU and MoBo I want for the NAS (R3 1200 and ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac) with ECC Unbuffered support for FreeNAS.

I can't however decide whether to upgrade his Gigabyte BRIX with SSD or whether to make the new system run FreeNAS in VM and use Linux as a main OS and also use VM for W10 (So Linux + VM Windows 10 + VM FreeNAS) the system will be running most of the time 24/7.

He needs Windows just because of some software required for his business which he doesn't use often and is very light on resources.

Since the system will be just for basic tasks like browsing and documents + NAS, and it will be turned ON 24/7 most of the time, I plan instead of OC to undervolt the thing.

 

There is the catch.

R3 1200 has no integrated GPU so if I wanted him to use this system also like a PC, I would need to buy a GPU as well.

Now the decision whether to spend € for GPU for the Gigabyte BRIX or for cheap GPU like GT 1030 for example...

  1. WereCat

    WereCat

    BTW:

    I forgot to mention that if he wants to use the software that is required for his business, he needs to buy it again for the new system since it is somehow tied to the particular OS... (I think it costs less than €50 which is still quite a bit of money for our salaries).

  2. PCGuy_5960

    PCGuy_5960

    A used i5 (Skylake/Kabylake/Haswell/Ivy Bridge) is also a good option. You can probably find them for the same price as an R3, but they have an iGPU. ;)

  3. WereCat

    WereCat

    @PCGuy_5960 True, I already considered that option. The thing is that the CPUs I like (Pentiums with HT for example) are KabyLake and if I want ECC for ZFS file system, I need C236 motherboard. Now those are expensive as hell in miniITX+WiFi and that's with less performance for the same price and no option for RAM OC or CPU OC or undervolting, and.if I wanted low power I would have to get the T CPUs and not to mention that I need BIOS update for KL prior to installation (if I considered the Pentium, since it is KL and C236 is SL)

  4. DJ46

    DJ46

    I personally wouldn't throw money at a system with a Celeron CPU.

     

    On the other hand, I just remembered that I temporarily put an SSD into my fathers old laptop. Apart from video playback and Windows updates spiking CPU usage to 100%, it was surprisingly usable. And that's with a mobile Core 2 T5550.

  5. WereCat

    WereCat

    That system was fairly cheap (under €200) and it was bought just because the old laptop died.

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