Nickglott

Looks like it is now a kickstarter on Indegogo, not sure why when it was said to be released soon, then had delays, and now is just a kickstarter with a month left. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dbrand-grip/ LMG , Did you know this when they proposed to be a sponsor that it would be a kickstarter?

never mind for some reason I thought you said drill press ha

So..... I started my new build about a week ago.m. Original plan was white and black theme with RGBW (true white led's). Well it turns out that no matter if it has real white leds or mixes the colors together that no white is ever the same and that also goes with same manufactures. Heck my motherboard has RGBW built into it but some of the led's on the board are not rgbw but a few are? I decided to keep white/black but go for RGB(W) as well. I am not a big RGB fan but I mean it beats 4 different colored white lights so I started the quest to get everything controlled through the motherboard and that is very very hard granted I already had a 1080 and a few other things already. In the process of trying to see how to possibly replace my LED's on my EVGA 1080 FTW I figured out that they were already wired for RGB with 12V of power just to be controlled by EVGA software, so those will be next when my connectors get here because I don't want to just clip off the ends of my expensive cards. But the SLI bridge is another story. Yes gigabyte, and Asus have RGB SLI bridges but I have EVGA cards and already have a bridge so I took my it apart and looked inside. RGBW okay time to mod.... I did look around a bit and am surprised that in searching for this I never found it. Here is a video of it in acton. https://photos.app.goo.gl/AlHHaEIcu9M9oKJp2 (Don't mind the 8700k with a stock intel cooler ) The opened SLI bridge with RGBW connector cut off (After an hour of searching digi-key I was unable to figure out what kind it was so time to solder. I am guessing its 30 AWG wire. Shaved the bridge so the tiny wires could pass through. Solder is done and add first layer of heatshrink. 2nd layer of heatshrink and added wire sleeving . 2 more layers of heatshrink to protect the solder joints since I only had 24AWG wire to solder to the 30AWG wires and a compete mod, very happy I did this. Next the videocards as they have RGB 12v and use 4 pin gpu mini fan header and they are on the way.

Makes perfect sense to me. As I am waiting for my components to come in I think I'm starting to regret the TridentZ rgb decision. Since I'm going with the Gigabyte Mobo the fact that they won't sync with every other thing in my system will be a big let down. Plus all I keep seeing is how horrible the software is and that it conflicts with any other software like gigabyte fusion, Corsair link and o need both, as well as others including nzxt and Asus aura. Everyone says use the asus software and forget the gskill one but sadly I went be able to as this will be the first not Asus Mobo besides some ASRock itx ones ever. No support for many or update in months, even people's xmp profiles becoming curuprt so might be returning to these before I even open then. Sad because I always got TridentZ and they are great I guess gskill just can't code at all... Keep and try, get Corsair vengeance rgb, or get the white and black sticks ....hmmm

Meant it as 1080 TI, But I can not for the life of me figure out why no SLI unless the other is a AMD or not a TI or newer/970.

I could see why, so that over time he can replace/change things to match the RGB trend. Not everyone has the money to buy everything to match all at once. Performance first and aesthetics after. He could easily change the fan to match mobo and and cpu cooler. As far as the miss matched GPU's I do hope it was a good deal because that will be really hard to make them match later plus I assume finding the matching 980ti prob wouldn't have been too hard with everyone selling them to get 1080's.

@TahoeDust Thank you so much!!, Little bit blueish(Tho might be a little bit of the camera or your led strips making the white rather than being white leds) but I think with some of the White(Real) LED strips it should hide it. I think I will go with the Gigabyte motherboard as the mobo LED's look great as an accent. I really appreciate you taking the time do change those and taking the pic.

That was my plan if they didn't do white. Those are on sale for like $30 less but to be honest not really into the rgb scene but I think the white glow in the ram will match my build I'm doing with a closed loop with white fluid. Hopefully the new primochill Vue in white if they got it when it's released. I do appreciate the suggestion but this will be my new baby so cost isn't really a concern. But thank you!

Awesome! They have been ordered, thanks!

Did he have them and use just white, no other colors? Will do much appreciated.

Ello all, Well, basically I think the title says it all. Doing a white and black build here soon and trying to decide to order the RGB or the White/Black dims and can't seem to find a yes or no anywhere. The Software on youtube videos looks like it can do white as static, but I don't see white in any of the effects. So I guess I am looking to confirm that A) White can be picked period, B) White can be used with any/all effects(Breathing, Flash, ect.), C) IF white can be used, what it looks like(blueish or redish. Any help would be appreciated and not having me order it to try it, send back/have money being held up. Thanks.

If you are getting the 6700, I would spend the extra $35 to get the 6700k,, extra $30 on the evo 212. And look for a z170 board. IMO the resale value plus the performance will be better for just a little bit more.

I forgot to mention that currently FFMPEG is just using the CPU with Unraid. I know is possible to use intel quicksync in lunix, or VAAPI I just have not figured out how to get it running inside of a docker. It has been years since I have use linux/unix and I am not very savvy with it anymore although I am sure I can get that figured out hopefully. I mean it currently works for my worst case scenario but would be better for CPU usage if I could get it to work, I could also give my VM another core. I did seriously contemplate using an x99 for this build and spending the extra $$$ but every time I thought about it I couldnt get past that my NAS/HTPC would have a better CPU than my main rig HAHA. That would be just a cruel joke.

Okay, I would first like to say how sorry I am for people that still use Plex. I gave it a go for about 2 weeks. I don't think I have ever said "what the heck" and "that is so stupid" and "why" so many times as I have when trying to use Plex. I have used Emby for a long time since it was mediabrowser and maybe I am spoiled by it. I wont go into much detail but first off the very fist thing....playlist? Just why is it the first tab and also the fact that you cant remove it? Emby has playlists, collections and many other ways to organize data. Its mainly used to TV and movies.....i don't think a lot of people plan out in what order you are going to watch something. I understand for music yes but why is it a main tab and not a sub-tab. I will say Plex works but come on if you liked to be bound to using the same looking thing that everyone else uses you prob have a iphone and a mac and are okay with you stuff looking and acting like a sheep. I had so many problems that I had to do some weird stuff just to get some basic features to work like making routes so my local network could see the server when on a VPN for example. I could go on and on but I wont. Emby is open source and has pay features(people have to eat) but they take suggestions, work with people, and implement new features fast (not hundreds of pages of requested features that go unanswered). I will just stop and not continue because it is a good software but not highly customizable. If you use Plex, give Emby a try you wont regret it. Sorry for that rant...moving on. So I decided to do was replace my server that I have in Pittsburgh for watching local sports where I live. I had a old i7 2nd gen laptop that could just barely handle transcoding 1 steam at a time. I picked up a Asrock Desk Mini an i5 6600, 8gb ddr3 for $350. I had a 140gb SSD and a 1tb 2.5 HDD laying around and boom my pittsburgh server is compete and can now watch/transcode on the fly my Pittsburgh stations. I could not be happier, I wanted something small, cheap, and powerful to stick at my parents house. I was able to accomplish all that for less than $400. I was originlay looking at the i7 nuc but it cost too much and has a low preforming cpu. I could have put in a desktop i7 6700 and still been cheaper. Anyone looking for something tiny but powerful check the Desk mini 110 out. You cant add a graphics card well not easily. It has a m.2 4x that you could turn into a pcie to hack something up if you really wanted too. As for the topic I finally have it finished for now. I decided to skip using a m.2 x4 card due to that fact that it would be overkill as an SSD can keep up but may still go back to it later when I have more funds available. Also chose to comprise and stick to just 5 drives instead of 6 for NAS storage and I am glad I did but more on that later. The Build: Build was simple enough since I did great planing. I was originally going to use a gigabyte mobo and at the last second realized that the 4 sata connectors were a right angle and would have been a huge problem so switched to the asrock. Only downside was the asrock only has a single 1gig NIC not the end of the world but still sucks. I also wanted to watercool the CPU because I was worried about the heat of my HDDS in such a small case with everything packed so tightly. I did not know if I could fit the h80iv2 in since the thinker 120mm rad but its just made it with the help of a 120mm fan grill to prevent the tubing from hitting the fans. I have to say for the amount of stuff I fit in this case it turned out perfect. It is filled to the brim. Software: My original plan was to just use Windows 10 so i could use intel Quicksync to do my transcoding and leave my cpu at only 30% and still had the power in my forntend for the HTPC. After getting everything up and running and doing some testing I realized that my raid5 write speeds were not going to cut it. While copying my backups to the drives and trying to play a movie at the same time I was getting studders as the drives were bottoming out. I was only getting 30mb/s writes as this is the 1st time I have used 5 drives in raid5 and didn't realize I would be getting that bad of write speeds and if I wanted to use this as a NAS as well I knew I would be in trouble. FreeNAS, Worked great in my testing dramatically fixed my write speeds but only one problem, I wanted to use this as a HTPC....So I started thinking about using HyperV and running freenas as a VM and realized that if I could figure a way to get m HDDs to be unformatted in windows but give the VM full control I dont know how reliable it would be. Stated to think I was out of options and would have to deal with windows and slow write speeds. I did play around with caching in windows and while my speeds improved a little I did not like the trade off of possibly losing data in the event of a power outage.I thought about using Kodi but was always hated the UI of it. When I was about out of hope a stumbled upon a post somewhere... Night in shining armor...Unraid. At this time I had no idea that Linus was an unraid fan. I only found it by looking for FreeNas alternatives. I then learned you can run a windows VMs with attached hardware. I am one happy camper. This is a very unlikely scenario for a few reasons because some of my clients(shieldTV and HTPC) can direct play live tv w/o transcoding but it works! Transcoding 6 streams while playing a 4k moivie on my VM. My CPU was at 79c, Mobo 41c, HDD's 30c. GPU 40c. My CPU was at 97%. My VM is 1core/2threads 4gb ram and is good enough to play 4k movies so that is good enough for me. Future upgrades: Upgrade my HDDs to 5x8TB (Unraid you can upgrade drives as needed so I dont have to spend a ton at once.) I would have liked to rreturn the (2)2TB drives I just bought but used them for a week and I am not that kind of guy. Upgrade to m.2 for faster Cache drive, Maybe....kind of a waste of money because I only have 1gig NIC and cant add another so m.2 relay wont benefit me Nothing....cant not fit anything more in this system and 32TB will be enough space for anything I would want.

Update soon!!