Crunchy Dragon

The build continues, this time with some nifty parts! I started off just planning to build an upper, but I saw the grey receiver set while planning out the rest of my build and had a set of realizations: 1. I like the color 2. If I buy the set, then I'll already have a lower for when I build the complete rifle 3. I won't have to worry about color matching the upper and lower So one purchase and $20 at my local FFL later, here we are. Did a test fit of the upper + barrel, which fit perfectly. Upper and lower also fit together very nicely, albeit without pins. Should make for a very nice rifle when it's all done. I also decided to go for a two tone grey/black, which should look very cool.

Radiators are measured by the fans they use, not the actual size of the radiator itself. Any given radiator will be a little longer than the length of all the fans added up, by design. A 360mm radiator is a radiator that supports three 120mm fans(3 x 120 = 360). Because the radiator has to let liquid in and out, it'll have some added length for the tubes and connectors, which is why your radiator is longer than 360mm. You should be fine.

Absolutely, I've always enjoyed the videos where they get multiple users on one PC, even as far back as "2 gamers, 1 PC from 2014 or 15". I feel like I've started to fall away from the "enthusiast" space and deeper into the "tinkerer" space in the last few years, and the "here's a really cool idea, let's try and make it work" type of content. This is partly why I enjoy Apple mods, because Apple systems weren't designed for what people are doing to them, and it's a cool process that is usually documented very well. I could do the same thing with the same budget, but I'd probably make it look cooler at least. /shrug

I like seeing high end systems, but only if the budget and parts chosen for the budget are somewhat sensible. I guess if anything, it follows LTT's "Compensator PC" trend in which case, yeah, it has been a while since Compensator 3. You absolutely can go out and spend several grand on a PC, but it's not nearly as cool(to me) if you wasted half of it. Setting a high budget and using all of it practically is way more interesting.

I don't believe I've ever seen integrated graphics appear in Task Manager. I could be wrong, it's been a while since I had a system with integrated graphics. Not likely. If you're able to connect your monitor to the 1070, there shouldn't be any issues.

You've got plenty of horsepower to fire up a Proxmox or TrueNAS box for sure. I wouldn't say it would suck as a NAS, but it will draw more power than most people would want for something solely functioning as a NAS. If you can eat the power cost, I'd say go for it. You can learn a lot by setting up and configuring home servers and network devices yourself as opposed to buying a premade box that just needs hard drives and an internet connection.

I would open Task Manager while Blender is running and keep an eye on your performance metrics. Increasing RAM will only help if you're actually running out, otherwise it doesn't do much for you.

If your monitor isn't connected to your GPU, then you won't get an output from the GPU to the monitor and your GPU can't be used to run 3D applications. Judging by your post, it seems that your monitor is connected to your motherboard via VGA, which explains why Windows isn't detecting any displays connected to your GTX 1070: because there are no displays connected. I would suggest either finding a monitor with HDMI or DisplayPort input and connecting it to your GTX 1070 with either of those, or you can try to find a better HDMI to VGA adapter.

Yup. Downloading from streaming sites is pretty much always slow, no matter how you go about it.

I don't know what Costco has specifically(sometimes they have weird prices on things, also Black Friday sales are happening right now). On the used market, you can get a 16GB RAM/512GB SSD 13" M1 MacBook Air for between $750-950. If multiple monitors are a necessity, a 13" MacBook Pro with the same specs goes for around the same price. Again, that's on the used market though. Depending on what the productivity tasks are, it may or may not matter for OP. macOS is pretty efficient at using RAM; from what I've heard, 8GB on M1 can go farther than most of us would expect, with the main limitation being when you really need VRAM.

I haven't bought anything tech-related on a Black Friday sale in years, and this is the first year in a long time that I've bought anything not tech-related on a Black Friday sale. Typically I buy most of my tech things used or refurbished anyway, so sales(inflated or not) don't affect me at all, unless whatever I'm looking at is equal to or better than something on the used market for the same price.

Have you tried opening up the iMac and blowing out dust? Bad PSU won't cause your parts to run at lower clock speeds, it sounds more like thermal throttling to me. I have a 2010 iMac that was used for quite a few years and then sat in a closet for several years, similar configuration to yours. When I opened it up the first time, there was an unbelievable amount of dust buildup that I had to clean out. This guide from Ifixit is more or less what I used to open up my iMac. Mine is a 27", so it might be a little different than yours, but the overall method should be the same.

Honestly, I doubt it. You can get close depending on the laptop, but I don't believe there's a better laptop experience than a MacBook currently. Especially sub-$1000, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a Windows laptop with a comparable trackpad and keyboard. In terms of the overall experience of using the laptop, MacBooks don't have much real competition.

Not from the internet, unless you do some really silly things in your network firewall configuration. From the network, possibly, that might vary by type of NAS and how you set things up. Sharing a drive via network on Windows for example, you can set it up so that only certain accounts on the sharing PC have access, and you can lock it down that way.

That's nearly an impossible question to answer. In an ideal world, a given PC part will run more or less until the silicon is too degraded to continue working, but almost anything else will fail before that, even in the most optimal setup. Personally, I tend to upgrade my systems every 4-5 years as my use cases evolve and parts age.

Usually it'll connect to your router. You don't have to keep it connected all the time, but I've not done much with proper NAS systems myself yet. Network-attached is really convenient, even if you don't use it that much. I have a drive in my workstation available on my network that I might use once a month to transfer something to/from my laptop or even a virtual machine on occasion.

A NAS sounds like a more efficient/elegant solution to your problem -- the SMB protocol doesn't care about operating system(I read and write to one of my network drives from Windows, Linux, and Mac without issues), so you don't have to worry about dual-booting. The storage won't be directly attached to your computer, and should be somewhat safe in the event of a virus(always have backups of your backups, though). If you're deadset on not having a NAS, then yeah the cheapest and most simple solution is like what @Electronics Wizardysaid: buy some external drives, back up to those, keep one of them offline, maintain multiple copies of your data.

Both of your PSUs have a 12V rail, that's basically where the power comes from. You shouldn't need to worry about adding amps. You can use a 20+4 pin connector in a 24 pin header. Modern PSUs split the 4 pin connector out to be compatible with earlier ATX motherboards that only used a 20 pin connector. GTX 600-series liked to have power, I'd trust the 500W unit a little bit more than the 460W Dell unit. Almost no BIOS is capable of caring what kind of PSU you have installed. As long as the proper power is supplied in the right places, it'll run.

If you want to continue with the white theme, Fractal Design does make the North in white. Other than that, I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary. Most new builders don't need thermal paste(most coolers will already have it applied from the factory), but it's never a bad idea to have a tube on hand.

I use Handbrake to convert all my video, most of which start life as .mkv files and end as MP4s.

bequiet! has RGB fans: https://www.bequiet.com/en/casefans/light-wings/3447 Corsair makes RGB ML fans that, based on what I've been told, are more or less the quietest you can find: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/c/case-fans/rgb-fans?filter=formatted_tech_specs.Bearing+Type%3A%3AMagnetic+Levitation I've never heard this said, ever

I've gotten faster over the years, but it still takes me a few days before I have a fresh OS install fully dialed into how I want things. I'm still discovering new configurations in my browser alone that I want to tweak. One day, I'll just make a full checklist of everything I configure on a fresh system so I can run through that instead of needing to rely on memory...

Sounds like you have an extremely convoluted RAID1 spread across 2 systems instead of contained in a single system. Easiest solution I can think of is to set up a single dedicated machine that can hold several hard drives, and configuring that as your NAS, probably with a RAID10 array(RAID0 nested in a RAID1).