Crunchy Dragon

It depends on the data. Some things will be just fine and Windows will sort itself out, others might throw fits because NTFS reconfigured them to be installed in and run from D:\, not C:\.

All I want for Christmas is MOTF to get unlocked

Not a whole lot, actually. High performance in Windows, normal BIOS changes to let it run as far as it can. It was on a Gigabyte X99 board, so it's definitely not being held back by the C612 chipset on a server board.

Agreed. Maybe if these had 12-16 core variants with more cache, they'd be decent bang for buck in 6-8 years on the used market, but outside of their targeted market of small businesses and essentially small cloud/server applications, most of us regular folks won't really have a use for these chips.

Being a Xeon CPU, they're also not going to work on the consumer platform. Xeon support in consumer motherboards has been incredibly hit or miss since Skylake, and practically nonexistent since Kaby Lake. Intel's doc states support for C262 and C266 chipsets, which might mean these will appear in smaller servers and higher end workstations, akin to the older Dell PrecisionTowers and Lenovo ThinkStations that ran server chipsets and Xeons. The boost clock is nice, but one thing a lot of people overlook with running a Xeon is that it tends to take more work for them to actually reach the maximum boost clock. I have a Xeon E5-2690v4(2.6Ghz base, 3.5Ghz max boost) and that topped out at 2.9Ghz running Cinebench R23 for the full 10 minutes. Xeons are designed to be workstation and server powerhouses, so their behavior when you put them to work reflects that moreso than your typical consumer/enthusiast-grade CPU that's typically meant to run as fast as possible all the time. Occasionally, you can do some funny things to a Xeon by tinkering with BCLK, but that can also induce instability elsewhere in the system.

Only if the RAM you're buying from Micro Center is DDR4, and not DDR5. Even then, it might be spotty, as you would have to overclock DDR4 in order to reach 4000. DDR4 doesn't typically like clocking that high, and you can induce all kinds of errors and problems with unstable memory overclocks.

Nano should automatically save file name, as shown at the bottom where it says "File Name to Write: /etc/systemd/logind.conf". Ctrl + S should save the file as it is, and then you should be good to go.

Best option, I would say, is probably looking at a Ryzen 5 or 7 from a recent generation, upgrading to B550 and DDR4 RAM. Your graphics card should be okay for another few years, if you're willing to not crank settings high or play higher than 1080p.

Unless it's a triple channel board(not likely), you lose a bit of bandwidth by having 3 instead of 2 or 4. The loss likely won't be noticeable at all, but it will be there.

Looks good to me. Only thing I might change, and this is really just a nitpick, is getting a 1000W or 1200W power supply to hold over for future upgrades. You don't have to do that, though.

The last generation of Nvidia cards that supported SLI were the RTX 2070 Supers, and even then SLI had almost no performance benefits to speak of. The current state of mGPU for gamers is that it's dead, and will stay that way.

I've done it before when installing a new OS drive. I simply install the empty drive, install Windows on it, boot to it, and do whatever I need to before formatting the old one. Never had any problems with that method, but I've never tried running it long-term. Intuition suggests it should work okay.

The first one I remember hitting the market was around $170, it was the Corsair 460X. Feels like cases that have the option to invert are generally less expensive than ones that are only inverted, but maybe I'm incorrect. Been a while since I delved super far into the case market.

That system is plenty for a starter server. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Proxmox and virtual machines, but bare metal Linux with Docker will be just fine. It's possible to run everything in Docker through Windows, I would say it really comes down to what you feel like running. A lot of people I know like Jellyfin over Plex these days. I haven't cast my lot in with either one yet, but have used Plex in the past.

They were ordered

Gigabyte, Asus, and MSI seemed to be the main ones, but I wouldn't imagine uncore memclk ratios would be relevant in any way, if all you want is ECC support.

Based on my internet searching, I'm not yet convinced that it does work. That may not be a server board, but Intel's HEDT platforms have always been very close to being server platforms, except for a few minor details in chipset features. Numerous X58 boards are reported to have BIOS updates that add ECC support, but no Core i7(that I'm aware of) has ever supported ECC, and the i7-975 in question certainly does not.

That's a pretty slick setup. I also support and approve Hybrid Theory.

I buy most of my PC parts secondhand, haven't ran into many problems. I would keep an eye on ECC vs non-ECC. Typically ECC RAM will work in non-ECC mode with motherboards and CPUs that don't support ECC, but that's not a guarantee.

Followed orders.

My Pihole runs in a docker contained via Portainer inside Ubuntu Server inside Proxmox. None of these all have the same IP address -- the host system running Proxmox has its own address that I use for the web UI, Portainer has its own, and Pihole has yet another one. Pihole itself has its own DHCP server, which you can enable/disable from the web interface. Inside Windows, that should be how you configure a DNS server. What type of connection problems are you having, specifically, when you say you can't connect to anything? Are you able to ping the IP address of your Pihole server from within Windows?

It's a vicious cycle, that will continually repeat itself every 20 years because of each new generation not being exposed to these techniques yet. Each generation will perceive advertisers and ads becoming smarter, but only because it's all new to them and they simply haven't encountered the repeated techniques before.

I'm really excited to see how it comes out. Everything except the stock is going to be black, so it should look pretty neat.