Hamilton

Yo! A potential 'HOLY $H!T'-type idea: SMPTE 2110. It's a standard that's starting to take over broadcasting A/V, and it handles mass transport of uncompressed audio and video over network. Meaning backbones of broadcasting companies that adopt equipment supporting the standard will be changing from coaxial to fiber optics. So the switches that have to support entire broadcast workflows have to be gnarly. Netgear has been launching specific product lines to support standards like 2110: M4250, M4300, M4350, and M5000. The highest capacity switches, coming from the M5000 line, have 48xSFP28/8xQSFP28 and 32xQSFP28. It's kinda crazy to imagine switching from running coax everywhere (cameras, gfx machines, routers, switchers, destination screens, etc.) to network lines. Nevermind the flexibility that could come from having those lines connected to networked switches, rather than sending signal strictly from point to point. Personally, I'd love to see LTT test Netgear's A/V line to see what specific advantages it has compared to other common brands. .....or if you're ever itching to fully saturate 10G/40G/50G/100G connections that a file server might not be able to, try sending uncompressed video feeds instead >:)

Hey guys, Per the suggestions of a few of you from my last couple of posts, I decided to reach out to a local IT company to get an estimate on a network upgrade for the place I work. I've gotten a couple estimates from them - the second of which was from when one of my co-workers asked to reduce the number of cat6 runs in an effort to reduce the total cost of the upgrade. However, I was still a bit sketched out by the estimates, so I decided to put together a part list of my own while still using the labor costs from the original estimate. Essentially, I'm just wondering if I'm being overcharged by the IT company for these upgrades. I'll include both estimates and my spreadsheet below. Though, my spreadsheet didn't include the costs of lift rental and conduit, and assumed that the cabling that will be used is shielded and the "jacks" are the particular kind listed. Of course, any advice is appreciated! The original estimate The revised estimate My estimate (doesn't include lift rental or conduit)

So I just got the greenlight from my employer (I work for a church that's recently shifted to a heavy online content-based focus cuz covid) to work on a proposal for adding a Storinator storage server to our workflow. If you happed to see my last post, however, you know how wonky our current network setup is (it's essentially nonexistent), and I would recommend looking at that post if you're curious about the setup, as I went into detail there. To follow that post up, it's looking like we're going to opt to try and get the enterprise ISP to terminate the fiber connection at our building and leave the rest to us. This means that the Storinator purchase would have to coincide with a network upgrade. I know that will involve the purchase of a server rack, a decently beefy switch (ideally with a couple 10 gig copper ports to pair with those on the Storinator and a few PoE ports for the APs), and new APs at minimum. This is where I need the help of this community. Because I have very limited experience with equipment designed for a network of this scale, I'm at a loss as to what specific hardware to get and the number of APs to get (and where to place them) in order to cover the building. Am I forgetting anything? Do I need to have a router or are there switches that handle DHCP and all that other fun stuff? I'll attach the blueprint from my last post below in case anyone is curious as to the current state of the network (as of right now, the "communication closet" simply contains a modem, a small switch (6 ish ports I think) that feeds the APs and a security camera control unit, and RJ11 distribution for phones, and an HVAC unit (as do all the other closets in the auditorium)). One last detail, we're looking at being able to live stream starting around January, and we currently have nothing resembling a control room. Everything production-wise is done from front of house. I'm trying to push that we wall off the corridor extending out of the lobby (110) such that the new wall would be flush with the south wall of the infant classroom. From there, we'd construct a room-within-a-room setup for live, broadcast related production tasks. My thinking is that in that room is where I'd ideally have a network rack(s) to house the bulk of our equipment. Please correct me if this is a bad idea. I just wanted to put that out there so that you would know this specific upgrade would only be semi-permanent. Of course, I'm thankful for any/all feedback I can get. Thanks!

Hey guys! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here, but I need help/input. I'm currently one of four part time employees that make up the production staff of a smallish (3000 - 4000 members) church in a smallish town in the states. With COVID happening and all, we've spent the past several months upgrading our equipment to prioritize an online audience. These upgrades have included things spanning the AVL spectrum, but one thing that hasn't been touched yet is our "network." To give some background, we've been a church for the past several years, but only moved into a building of our own in the past year (until that point we'd been gathering at hotel conference centers and other venues around town). In order to quickly move into our building, many aspects of our setup were rushed, and we've been paying the price for that while upgrading our old, sub-par equipment - dealing with poorly routed wiring, low quality equipment/fixtures, etc. It's a fun time. Anyway, as we've been upgrading our other equipment, our network (or the lack thereof) has increasingly become a noticeable bottleneck. Additionally, we were approached by the enterprise division of an ISP with an offer to run a fiber connection to our building from a local node and install/manage APs. My interest was piqued, so I've worked with them for the past several weeks until I finally received a proposal from them last week. So, the underlying problem here is we're in desperate need of a network upgrade. However, I don't know whether to attempt to coordinate an upgrade myself or to work with the enterprise ISP (significantly more expensive). I'll provide details of our current setup and the one the ISP proposed below. Currently, we're paying $125/mo. ($250 without discounts) for around 600 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up, plus phone service. The building has two wireless access points - one in the main lobby and one in the main office wing. Both are fed by cat 5e running back into a closet in the auditorium where the coax line to the building is terminated. All three of these locations are marked on the blueprint of the building that I'm attaching to this post. There's also an apple airport (crappy, I know) that sits in our production booth that spans the back of the auditorium (not pictured in the blueprint), and it's what's intended to run an isolated network for our production equipment. It's currently not connected to he public internet. This solution was apparently made with the intention of providing our (at the time) limited staff with internet at those two places in the building, and not much more. Since then, our staff has expanded considerably (I joined back in January), requiring 30-40 people to be on the network at peak times (no, we don't have a guest network), scattered throughout the building. Frankly, I'm surprised the network has held up as well as it has, though there's still plenty of throttling and dropouts, causing delays and headaches. The communication closet isn't much at all. It contains a patch panel with its few working patches running to the office. This isn't used, as the only active pieces of equipment are the modem/router, and a small 5-ish port switch that feeds the APs. I'm limited in what I can say about the ISP's offer, but what I will say is that for around $1.5k/mo for 36 months, plus an installation fee, they'll give us 100 Mbps down and up (scalable up to 10Gbps), 5 static IPs, a managed firewall, and managed wifi. They won't show their plan for the layout of the APs until we sign a contract with them, but they did say they planned on installing 7 of them. I also don't know the specs of the APs they would use. The price also includes various service level agreements that guarantee impressive amounts of uptime, packet loss, jitter, yadda-yadda, as well as guarantees regarding customer service response times and a provided chain of command. I assume this is all geared towards a set-it-and-forget-it type of service, which would take a bit off my plate, sure, but costs a significant amount more than our current plan. In my own mind, a possible upgrade would involve moving the equipment from the communication closet into the booth and installing it on a rack along with our other rack-mountable production gear, buying a legitimate network switch, and adding new access points through the building (though, I don't know where exactly they would go). I'd imagine migrating as much of our equipment to use ethernet as possible (very little of it currently does), and adding APs would improve/resolve many of the issues we currently have, making the ISP's offer that much more irrelevant... right? It also should be noted that we're planning on beginning to live stream services starting in January. And, with that, I throw this problem out to you guys. Any help/feedback would be much appreciated, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Oh! I just caught a mistake. I found the micro ATX versions of the motherboard. My bad

I don't think that mobo (ATX) would fit my case (a mATX). Also, I'm looking at PassMark scores to judge the extent of the upgrade. The Ryzen 3 1200 scores significantly lower than both the FX CPUs. Would it still be worth it?

Before I talk, I'll list my specs: CPU - AMD Athlon X4 760K GPU - MSI GTX 960 RAM - 1x8GB DDR3 Storage - 1TB WD Black HDD PSU - Corsair CX430 Mobo - AMD A78M-E35 (micro ATX) Case - Rosewill LINE-M (running stock case fans) I've been running this setup for a while, and performance has been almost painful at times. I've gotten the impression that my CPU has been the main bottleneck of the system (if I'm wrong, then this forum post is kinda pointless. please point out where I'm wrong, and tell me what I can do better). When running games, quality settings often automatically set themselves to high, but I have to end up turning them down to get framerates that are anywhere near tolerable. Games like The Division (don't judge, I play on free weekends) are actually unplayable because the street I'm walking on won't load fast enough, so I'll often end up falling through the world while my friends run ahead of me. I built the rig almost four years ago on a strict budget, and I haven't really had the money to put towards upgrading it since. Even now I'm on a budget of somewhere around $200 (flexible by about $50). I've been looking at changing to an AM3+ mobo and upgrading my CPU to an FX-8350 or an FX-9590 (I'm aware that the 9590 "requires" water cooling). I was planning on digging around craigslist and ebay to find the best deal possible. I wanted to get input from you guys to see if this upgrade is a good idea/necessary. If you have any alternative suggestions or advice, please let me know. I have relatively low experience in the area of computer hardware, so I'm definitely not stubborn. I'll probably trust your opinions more than my own. Please throw out suggestions for CPUs, coolers, mobos, cases, etc. I'm open to ideas. Also, if there is room in the budget at all, I would really like to get a different case. I don't need to keep the micro ATX form factor. Size doesn't really matter to me. The LINE-M just doesn't have any room to manage cables (my PSU isn't modular), and it only has one fan for intake and one for outtake. Thanks!

Hello all! I had decided on getting a refurbished MSI GTX 960 at $175 with a $180 budget. I was about to order the card last week, but didn't get around to it, I was then disappointing when I played the Battlefront because I could only run the game at medium settings. HOWEVER, playing the Battlefront beta was a huge wakeup call as to how weak my x4 760k was. I was frequently hitting 100% cpu usage, and therefore my game's video and audio stuttering for seconds at a time making my game nearly un-playable. This issue brings my debate Over the weekend I have discovered that I can afford the i5 4590, a significantly better cpu. I have begun to debate with myself, if I get the gtx 960, will it be worth it? Or do I need to upgrade from my cpu to the i5? (i have the sapphire radeon r7 260x)

Yes, actually. I am HUGE into competitive CS:GO, so i was wondering if a 1ms difference would be that big of a deal...

Oh! forgot to mention, Is that monitor a good replacement? I have a crappy HP monitor that came bundled with a pre-built computer we got years ago. The thing is, the HP has a 5ms response time, and the one I am looking at has a 6ms response time. Is that something I need to be worried about?

Hello! I am looking at upgrading some things on my rig, my keyboard and monitor to be specific. I have just been debating, what do I buy first? For the keyboard, I was looking at the Razer Blackwidow to match my Razer Naga mouse. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823114038&cm_re=razer_blackwidow-_-23-114-038-_-Product For the Monitor, I was looking at the Acer H6 23" IPS desplay. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/acer-h6-series-23-ips-led-hd-monitor-black/4751006.p?id=1219103673253&skuId=4751006 My problem is I currently have limited funds, and the monitor is currently on sale (so is the keyboard, but only a dollar off). Thanks for looking at this post, feel free to comment as you feel, I am open to other suggestions as to different monitors and keyboards, GH

No, defiantly not a 100 tabber, and i do think a 970 would be a better card imo.

Thanks!

So, upgrade to an i5, a 750w psu, and an r9 290x?

Well, i'd say probably around $500. Nothing too major