Crunchy Dragon

Pretty sure we do that here in the States.

If it's possible to have the cables enter the plug head-on, or at least as head-on as possible, I would recommend that just for safety. Can't be too cautious.

Not seeing anything out of the ordinary here. CPU is a little older, but still plenty good and nothing wrong with it.

You might have to add it as an audio input inside OBS.

As long as the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs are all in the same places and the screws line up, it shouldn't be a problem. The only real difference between a Super and non-Super GPU is the amount of Cuda cores and clock speed, if I recall correctly.

That's pretty solid for sure, I bought my PSA for just over $600. My custom rifle is about $1-1.1k in parts, most of it was spent on the barrel and BCG. Still need to collect some good pictures of it(maybe one day in 50 years when I'm not busy), but so far it feels really good in the hand. I'm pretty pleased with it, for being my first build. What kind of triggers are in yours? Mine both have a standard mil-spec 2 stage that feels solid, but I've also not felt many other AR triggers.

We all gotta start somewhere. Looks like a decent enough rifle. I'm still waiting for the weather where I live to be nice enough that I can go shoot my new one

I am in agreement with @da na and @Zando_, but I will also mention that a rackmounted system probably isn't the best first server around. A tower server like a Dell PrecisionTower, Lenovo ThinkStation, some of the tower-style HP ProLiants, or even building your own server in a standard ATX case would be a more user-friendly route.

That's pretty normal. I have a Xeon E5-2690v4 that tops out at 2.9Ghz all core load, but the maximum turbo boost is 3.5Ghz(single core). Xeons don't turbo boost the same way Core CPUs do, so your CPU behavior sounds pretty normal and expected.

At the moment, I'm just running a really basic setup in terms of software, with plans to expand in the future as time and money allow for it. I originally built it as a playground for different operating systems so I could get more hands-on experience with Linux in particular. I'm running a simple Proxmox install, which is hosting an Ubuntu Server 22.04 that runs Docker via Portainer, and I'm running a Pihole server within that. Down the road, I have plans to set up Tailscale, Jellyfin, and TrueNAS. I may look into hosting a small Minecraft server as well. In terms of hardware, what I'm running is way overkill for the tasks my server performs; I've got a Xeon E5-2690v4(14 cores, 28 threads) paired with 64GB(4x16GB) of DDR4-2666, and a pair of WD Blue 1TB SSDs in a ZFS RAID1. Honestly if you want to save money, I would say to just send it, throw Proxmox onto your old gaming PC, and learn how to do stuff with that, then worry more about swapping parts out as the need for changes becomes more apparent.

I'm running a Noctua NH-U12S in my home server due to noise concerns, but it's a solid cooler for the price. It's a smaller cooler than a D15, but it keeps my Xeon E5-2690v4 cool without making much noise. If you can, I'd highly recommend a Fractal Design case. My server is in a Define R5, and that also does a lot of work to keep noise levels down. Agreed on 32 or 64GB, but the RAM usage part isn't true for all hypervisors. Some of them will allocate RAM to virtual machines, but the RAM stays free in the system until the virtual machine uses all of it -- for example, my Ubuntu Server VM in my Proxmox install has 8GB of RAM allocated to it, but only uses 1-2GB at a time, and the system's total RAM usage will reflect the 1-2GB, not the full 8GB I have allocated. ZFS loves to have RAM though, so I would definitely recommend having more if you plan to run a ZFS setup in any way, either via Proxmox, TrueNAS, or anything else that uses ZFS. In all honesty, DDR4 is fairly cheap, I don't see much reason to not go 64GB and have all the overhead you could realistically need or want in a home server, with regards to RAM.

The best solution in my mind is graphics cards that are smaller and lighter, and/or more rigid and robust PCIe slots.

I could see myself buying one in 10-15 years when they're all over the used market like LGA 2011 and 2066 Xeons.

Nicely done! Looks to be a solid setup, I like how you hid the cables for everything.

I'm with you on that. I would still rather have a 3.5mm audio cable to play music and things through my car speakers.

Antivirus won't make up for the operating system itself not receiving security updates. Good AV can mitigate it, but you're still creating an extremely large risk by running an outdated operating system in your network.

There are very good odds I buy or build an AK at some point in the future just to have one for the collection. Might look into some of the PSA 100-series AKs for that. I've heard AKs tend to like steel cased ammo moreso than brass, how true is that?

That is quite pretty. Redwood might be my favorite AK furniture.

I wonder how much of a difference it would make. I hear 300BLK achieves full powder burn in about 9" of barrel, so it should in theory be fine depending on how much of it is needed to cycle the bolt.

It'll game, but I would advise you to temper your expectations. Be prepared to turn settings and resolution way down, and don't expect modern games to run well, if at all. Almost any modern Ryzen APU will likely outperform it in terms of graphics capability.