johnt

Corsair just sent an email with select PSUs on sale for 25% off.

Are you using thermal paste?

Sure I will send it to you in a DM.

They seem largely similar, except the CPU and motherboards. The 12400 config is about $100 less, and that's mostly because of the motherboard. Neither one of these configurations will fit into the Jansbo N2 from your original post, but that's probably why you added another case. The N2 requires a mini ITX board, unfortunately. The ASUS motherboard is the same one that I use in my NAS. I think you would normally get a lot of push back from other forum members about wasting money on an k-sku Intel chip that can overclock. Unless you have a direct need for it, you really don't need that much horsepower in a home NAS/server. I agree that a slow chip is not ideal either, but the 12400 is a perfect balance in my opinion. Plus, the 12600k does not come with a cooler. That's another cost. The only suggestion I have is to skip the Crucial drive and look for an Intel drive instead. I've had nothing but great experiences with Intel drives, and the P3 Plus just does not perform the same. The Intel 670p 2TB is what I use in mine. The 1TB model will be just as good. I use it a lot to transfer files quickly to my NAS over the network, and then copy them to the SATA drives overnight. I don't have enough experience with modern Seagate spinning drives to answer this question. In the past, I've had nothing but bad experiences with Seagate drives. I have never had a premature failure, but I did have instability (in the Windows 95/98 era), louder devices, poor performance, freezing, more frequent bad sectors. I think the reason I didn't have a premature failure is I just had to replace them before they could fail lol. I've just learned to avoid them. I bought a 5400rpm 2.5" drive for an Intel NUC about five years ago and the performance was so bad I just never used it. I did use the drive in a simple NAS situation and that served faithfully for years, but it was just on all the time and infrequently used... but it did keep the data! I'm sure there 7200rpm NAS products are better but I'm too jaded on this brand lol Western Digital drives are my go to. They are all very expensive and using something like RAID1 for redundancy is just double the expense! I actually started looking for used drives on Amazon. I found a seller who has 2 TB drives for $29 each, and they had less than 30 days of use with manufacture dates from 2016 and 2017. They are performing perfectly in RAID1. My goal is to upgrade to much larger capacities in the future, but so far my 2 TB drives are serving me well. I can send you a link if you're interested. I have no affiliation with the seller and your drives may be wildly different than mine. For me, it was a fun starter "who cares what happens" project that seemed to work and I got the kinks out and it's just been working just fine.

Here are a couple recommendations from Ubiquiti systems $150 Gateway/Router/Built in wifi AP: https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-unifi-cloud-gateways/products/ux It only comes with one WAN port for internet, and a single LAN port for an additional connected device. This device has a lot of limitations compared to their other, more expensive, products. However, it does have a lot more than your traditional ASUS/Netgear stuff you find at Costco or Best Buy. You will need a simple switch to add more LAN ports. They have a very inexpensive one to start: $30 Flex mini normal switch (can be powered with POE, but don't worry about that as it's beyond your budget, it also comes with a power adapter): https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/switching-utility/products/usw-flex-mini The Flex mini will give you four additional ports for connected devices. Unifi has a huge selection of gear, and these recommendations are just the sand at the beach. There is the whole ocean available to you. Unifi's APs can be added using POE (you would need a different switch for that) or they will work in wireless Mesh mode to extend your coverage. They are very versatile, relatively easy, and mildly affordable. Prices were better before the pandemic. But they have U6 Lite APs that cover a great area in your home for $99, and fancier APs with Wifi7 go up to $200ish. But start small within your budget. I mean $180 to get started is not bad at all.

Go for an i5 12400 with 32 GB of memory. Make sure the CPU has an integrated GPU. This will save you money if you are not planning to purchase a dedicated GPU right away. You may never need to if your CPU has it. Buy the cheapest brand name motherboard you can find (AsRock, ASUS, MSI, etc.) that has the number of SATA ports you need and at least one NVME/M.2 port. Also consider if you need a 2.5 Gbps NIC onboard. They are very inexpensive to add on later if you need to improve your bandwidth speeds in the future. The other thing is the case you are going to build in. The N2 requires a mini ITX board, so that is going to be a significant cost just for the form factor.

You can look into a wireless service from the major ass hol... I mean cell phone carriers. The plans used to be a lot cheaper, but now they want around $50 a month it seems. They basically sell or give you a 5g antenna to place near a window, and it has a power port and ethernet port to connect to a device or network. I believe the T mobile one also comes with a built in router that you cannot fully disable, but you can hid the SSID. The benefit of this is that you can fully bypass your apartment's network and requirements, and you do not have to use coax or phone to receive a separate internet signal. Of course, it's only amazing if you have decent 5g coverage at your place.

The program could be reporting the wrong information... Did you try a second program?

I accepted it bc I hated storing discs and floppies. It’s not like discs were the only medium for games lol one version of flight sim had like 24 floppies. It wasn’t sustainable. It’s also become extremely obsolete. I can download the entire earth in a crazy resolution from steam in under an hour. I hate gaming on a console when my nephew has to find the disc and pop it in just to verify ownership. It’s stupid. but I also don’t like having five different drm stores to navigate for all my tastes now. Each one becoming more resource heavy than the previous version. I mean the windows store is a joke. A JOKE!!!!!!!!!!!! But it’s easier than managing physical media when I want to play something. I used to pirate games when I was very young, so I guess I’ve always been okay with digital only.

50 is the way to go if you need quantity.

Those contact frames are god tier.

Diagnosis is truly an art. But the fear mongering on this forum just for opening your PSU is on another level. Last year I was in an argument for swapping my PSU fan that was making a very loud bearing sound under load. It was a five minute job with a simple mini fan connector. It's not helpful to tell people they are going to die if they open their PSU. That doesn't fix problems... just creates e-waste. I could have easily bought a new PSU to get rid of the noise but it was a $20 fan.

30 is all you need. 50 seems like advertising but it’s a bigger quantity, which is the biggest difference in my review. 70 is an intermediate volume and comes with applicators and cleaning wipes. Wouldn’t recommend 50 or 70 if you are doing less than five CPUs.

Sorry it's not "mask" per-say. The devices just create a different MAC address at times. From the fruit corp:

Why don’t you just disable the NIC in one of the OSes? It’s so much easier than messing with network stuff.

I think you need a fancier router to do this properly. But I feel like I remember ASUS has a way you can assign IP addresses to certain devices (likely after they are assigned), and then toggle their internet access. But this only works with devices already connected to your network. I don't think those routers can do VLANs or control multiple SSID's with different settings. But this isn't always going to work with modern devices. I noticed my iPhone masks its MAC address for wifi somehow. It shows up as a different device from time to time. I'm confused though. If you don't want wireless devices having internet access, why connect them to your wifi at all? Also, if you don't want wired devices having access until you approve them, don't let them plug in a wire maybe??

This upsets me greatly lol I feel like there is a niche market here that I could capitalize on

What happened to the warranty?

That's exactly what we discovered from the last debacle a few months ago... You need to do your own research at times and get your hands dirty with your own projects. I'm not suggesting everybody open their own PSUs and start replacing components willy nilly. But it isn't as hard or as complicated as the tubers make it sound. There are a lot of capable people in this world.

They are definitely the most qualified bunch to give advice

Damn this thing is almost perfect. If I can find a way to cut off the top, place it side by side, and make it fit into a rack..... it would be end game. Take my money! I would even be happy with 6 bays. I know I'm monopolizing the Op's post but I've been searching for a decent 2u or 3u case with hot swap that isn't 24 inches long (nominal) and I'm convinced it doesn't exist.

I run my Plex server from a Windows PC and the usage always spikes to 100% during transcoding. I don't see the fate of a 12600k being much different. I'm getting curious about unraid and truenas just to see the differences.

That's a great price for that chassis. Wish it wasn't so long deep...

Plex transcoding can be tough on a cpu. I would go with the 12600k since it’s cheaper with the same P core count.

Corsair