Marco2G

I just can't imagine that it's going to end well to put a voltage onto something that is not made to receive a voltage. I changed my mind about the USB switcher. I will just have two USB extensions on my desk and attach the hub to the one I need. So I thought why not upgrade to USB-C... turns out, most USB hubs with a USB-C connection upstream seem to suffer from weird effects, too, like disconnecting randomly and stuff.. I'm coming to the conclusion that USB has become such a commodity that nobody gives a fuck these days whether the stuff they sell even remotely works. Edit: I just tested my USB 3.0 hub with external powersupply and this thing does not power my computer's LEDs when the PSU is off. The USB3 extension cord does.

Hi everyone I am currently wrestling with a USB problem on my PC that has brought up a few questions. See, I am using a USB 3.0 switch right now to be able to flip my peripherals between my home PC and my work laptop. Basic home office thing, right? Today I just have a simple USB hub behind the thing but previously had had a USB-C docking station attached. The USB hub has the option to receive 5V power from a wallwart. I remember with the USB-c dock that my PC would still have LEDs light up, on the GPU too, even though I flipped the power switch on the power supply because the USB-C dock had charging power on the USB-C uplink. The hub will probably do the same, I think. I had a similar thing with my active USB extension cable that I used back when the PC whas in the attic and I used to jsut lay down 15m of USB and DP cabling to connect the peripherals. There too the 5V the cables introduced would light up the PC even when disconnected from main power. My question is whether this is a problem. I imagine it should be as I cannot imagine this being good for the motherboard. Which brings me to the next question: Since my el-cheapo sabrent USB switch seems to downgrade the connection to USB 2.0 and thus does not allow for a USB 3 thumbdrive to be connected, I need to rethink my current setup. I don't particularly want to attach the dock anyhow as the additional ethernet port and HDMI and USB audio that then connects clutters up my HW list and frankly Linux does strange things when audio devices come and go like that. That being said, I need suggestions for a USB switcher and a HUB that follow USB standards, that WILL support all kinds of USB 3 (preferably 3.2) devices and that will not feed 5 volts into my PC or laptop. So question: Is there any such solution out there that doesn't cost hundreds of $? The cheap chinesium crap obviously isn't worth even what little it costs.

Just as an example, take this: https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-hm80?variant=39960884281505 You could totally use this thing as a virtualization node (probably even for Vmware ESXi but would have to be verified). There's just no space for storage in there... Attach home NAS like https://www.newegg.com/synology-ds420/p/N82E16822108744?Description=nas&cm_re=nas-_-22-108-744-_-Product And add the storage you need. Just know that in a 4 bay NAS, you cannot do RAID6 so going too large on your single disk size becomes dangerous. With RAID5 in a 4 bay NAS, you get like 5TB of usable space out of 4 2TB disks. for 4 TB disks it would be more like 10TB. Any higher than that and you run the risk of rebuilds (in case of harddrive failures) taking so long, you might lose a second disk and thus ALL your data. It would be advisable to buy five disks outright and keep one as a spare so in case of a failure you don't have to wait three days for a replacement to be delivered. So you got like 850 for the mini PC, somewhere like 550 for the NAS and now you'll want 5 let's say 4 TB disks. A WD RED 4TB NAS disk is about 110 each. Times 5. So you're looking at a total of approx. 2k investment upfront if you went this route... will this work for you? THAT we cannot say....

Server hardware is server hardware precisely and exclusively because it is made to run in an enterprise environment. That means it has a maintenance contract, it's standardized hardware (which basically means the client decides upon a vendor and a model from that vendor) and it is made to run in a server room. That means these things are loud. Unless you have a closet you can soundproof and ventilate/air condition, you DO NOT WANT server hardware at home. Hence my tale of ripping out most things "server" and replacing it with consumer hardware. The stuff will run 24/7 one way or the other, don't worry about that as long as you don't put it somewhere where the heat can't move away. Heat is your enemy. You can absolutely buy a mini PC for 700 bucks and a four drive NAS and work with that... again it depends on the CPU load and the storage requirements. You want Nextcloud, file and Plex server but failed to mention HOW MUCH DATA you're planning on each service. A storage system can look considerably different whether you need 4 TB of low performance storage or 20 TB of low latency storage. I'm afraid you don't know enough about what you actually want to run for us to propose the hardware to run it on. Do you already use some of the services you mentioned? If so, how is that specced today?

I mean what the hell is your budget :D??? I built my homeserver from an old storage appliance. This is a 24 3.5" slot chassis. I ripped out the original storage card and added one that would NOT hide the disks behind a RAID. I ripped out the original powersupply because it was server room grade and thus loud as a mofo. Cut a hole in the lid and laid a corsair 1200 on top of it. Looks stupid but worked flawlessly for years now. Cut another hole in the lid for 140mil fans so I could remove the small tubrines that are datacenter fans. Also loud like mofos. Bought a second CPU for the dual socket board and additional ram. What I'm doing is running the VMs off of a consumer SSD, no redundancy. I have backups though. I have ESXi isntalled. Works like a charm. Doing a passthrough of the storage HBA and a USB addin card to a FreeNAS VM that then uses the 3.5" WD RED disks in a ZFS and holds my mediacenter files. I'm running Jellyfish off of another VM. Networking is handeled by an Untangle VM. I believe I'm running like 8 VMs in total. The whole setup only cost a few hundred and the chassis is a 4E rackmountable one, if I wanted. The specs are 64GB RAM, 2 times Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz 10 cores each. The questions we need answered are: How much do you look to spend? How do you want to solve the storage question? External NAS or internally managed storage? How much storage? RAID level? Backup solution? Becayuse I'm thinking I could probably easily run my setup on a Ryzen 5800X and have resources to spare. So can you, probably. Do you want new hardware with warranty? Or do you like the idea of scrounging old enterprise grade hardware off of eBay and tinkering? And not to forget, depending on your level of expertise/your willingness to learn, we can determine what level of frankensteining will be appropriate. That setup of mine is hella frankensteined and it took some work to get it running and I would NOT recommend it to a layman because working with ZFS and making backups off it in my setup isn't as straight forward as if I had installed Freenas directly or a proxmox or something like that. I am a professional storage and virtualization engineer. While that is not necessary for my setup just keep this in mind, okay? Oh, also don't forget the UPS for your server... so once again, what is your budget?

Thank you for your reply. I don't want to go Intel this time. I want to see the balance of power shift somewhat more to AMD still. Hoping for an equilibrium at some point :). Since the game I play most is very single-threaded and I'm a savescummer, I'm hoping (!) for better loading times when the whole interconnect between chiplets and RAM is optimized. Might be a pipedream but we'll see. You're right, my hardware vendor does sell Ballistix RAM @ 3200 MHz at half the price but we're talking 90 bucks difference. Applied to the whole build that's like 12% price hike. I can live with that. I have been looking at X570 Mobos but frankly, what's the point? I have one GPU max in there and it's doubtful that THAT will profit from PCIe4 at all. Storage? I need a boot gumstick. Right now I'm booting and working off of a SATA SSD. The M2 in the system currently only holds the Steam library because the M2 is also only SATA and not PCIe. As to USB, the TUF has two USB 3.2 Gen2 1 Type A and one type C. 4 USB 3.2 Gen1. Way enough for connectivity. I connect a lot of crap but nothing truly high bandwidth. Again stability is worth more to me. And from what I read, the VRMs on this board are pretty excellent. I am just not impressed enough with PCIe4 storage right now to find that worthwhile. Frankly I needed to keep price relatively sane in order to finally convince myself to hit the trigger at all! As mentioned, I've delayed building a new rig for several years now. My 4670k is overclocked to 4.5 GHz. It still does most things astoundingly well. I feel the RAM does give me wiggle room to play whereas X570 doesn't provide much over B550 IF the B550 has a well engineered power delivery. From what I gather, my TUF should have exactly that.

Huh, just noticed that my vendor actually has RAM with a CAS latency of 16 @ 4000MHz. So I'm guessing I'm going to try for an FCLK of 2000 and if the CPU doesn't like that, go down to 1900 with tighter timings still.

Hi there I was planning to wait to upgrade my system until the next Ryzen was out. You know for new DDR generation and so forth. But frankly, this was my argument for waiting for several generations... the next one will be a bit better, just wait. Well, now we have this clusterfuck going and nobody knows when the new CPU with new socket is gonna be released, nobody knows how overpriced DDR5 is gonna be and nobody knows how long it's gonna take for them to get all the bugs straightened out in all these new hardware implementations. Add to that, I think I ave never in my life done a CPU upgrade without changing the board. SO. I've kept my finger on the pulse on how to optimize Ryzen from time to time but I am unsure how valid these things still are for Ryzen 5000. So if I may I'd like to through my plans into the ring and add the thought process. Please feel free to tell me I'm an idiot on any of them. In my mind, bumping infinity fabric to 1900MHz is/was desirable. Overclocking the CPU beyond that seems to often be counterproductive. So I would like to go with the ASUS TUF GAMING B550-PLUS. It seems to be solidly built even offers PCIe4 even though I don't think I'll use it and it's a good value. Also all the latest USB I could need, HDMI 2.1 if I ever put in an APU (unlikely) and 2.5Gbit Ethernet, also nice to have but not supported by my switch. I would put a Ryzen 5800x on it. And Corsair Vengeance LPX clocked at 4000 MHz with a CAS latency of 18. Not the best but the Trident Z Neo with 3800 MHz, I think, and like CAS 14 cost almost a third more. My idea is to put infinity fabric to 1900 MHz, step the memory down to 3800 MHZ and possibly tighten timings a bit. I will keep using my old GTX 780. I don't game very much and when I do it usually city builders or map painters like EU4. I do DVD and Bluray Ripping too. My display is 1440p 60Hz and unless I finally come across a game that makes me really salivate for graphics and immersion (Cyberpunk was not it and I have given up on Star Citizen), this won't change anytime soon. One important aspect for me is that the USB be rock solidly implemented. My current Asus Z97-a has weird interactions with my dock and KVM solutions. So if anyone knows of USB issues with the TUF, I'd appreciate a heads-up. So... How off the rails is my thought process? Thank you.

The ZBook throttles like a motherfucker as far as I've read...

Switzerland. Weight can be more than the MAcbook. I've been trying to make a temporary replacement machine in the last week and was carrying around a MBP 2017, MBP 2012 and two chargers as long as it's lighter than THAT, I'm good. Batterylife obviously as good as possible but frankly, that's nice to have. For the few times I do something on the train, an hour of battery life is enough. In the office, at home and in the server room I have power outlets.

I absolutely do need an RJ-45 port. Right now that's solved by the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and a dongle. As you can imagine, I am fond of neither.

I'll have to see whether they do business in my region. Also liquid metaling the shit out of it sounds like what I'd do but isn't that a tad dangerous in a laptop? Do they give warranty on that? As for the Gigabyte one, they are quite expensive due to the GTX 2070 I'd never need....

Hi everyone Getting fed up with the dreck that is Apple Macbook Pro I was looking into what alternatives there are. This is a company laptop. My alternative at the time was a 13 inch Surface. I chose the Apple because it's 15 inches and because I figured I'm not much better off having to get used to Win10 so I might as well give OSX a chance. Two years later, I'm thoroughly done with OSX. Seeing as I had a Win10 vm running on it (with classic shell so I don't have to murder people) I am thinking of just installing Win10 on this. Problem is preliminary tests with a 2012 Mabook ended in boot problems. Anyhow, another issue is I cannot find anything that is actually better than this. It all seems to be garbage. If you want something that has 32 Gigs of RAM and doesn't throttle too much, you have to get a gaming laptop and live with it looking cheesy as all hell AND you'll be paying for a gaming graphics card I really don't need and don't want. So is there a laptop on the market that looks somewhat professional, has decent IO, comes with 32 Gigs and a GPU from Intel? I need decent CPU power but I don't think I'd need more than 6 cores. Four might do the job actually. Oh yeah, if it could be somewhat easy on the ears, that would be great. Does such a thing exist?

Unless I get Nikolai Tesla to haunt my appartment, I don't think I'll be able to power the speakers wirelessly... so SOME cables will need to be routed one way or another. Might as well save a penny and not buy wireless then, right?

So let's go at this from another angle: I was fed up with running cable to all the speakers in ye olden 5.1 days... How many speakers does one need for a good atmos setup? Does it still take 5.1 or more speakers at ear level PLUS atmos speakers on the ceiling?

I'd have to tilt it backwards but then the sound that's going forward would travel over people's heads...

Hi I have angled ceiling above my tv and in thinking how I'm gonna upgrade the setup in the future, I was thinking of a soundbar since I got pretty fed up with my Yamaha receiver. For my noob ass, these things are just too complicated. Now I want to know do atmos soundbars work with ceilings angled away from them as well or will the sound quality suffer to the point it's a waste?

I just tested from the workshop to the garage and that worked fine. So I will buy another set of adapters and hope they actually do work like the graphic on TP-Links website implies

Here in Switzerland we have three phases. I will try whether the garage might be on a different one than the apartment and the workshop.

Which is exactly why I'm asking if anyone has experience in this matter.

Hi everyone I live in a six apartment building and I've connected my workshop in the basement to my network on the third floor via a powerline bridge. Now I'd like to be able to open and close my garage door via app. When I bought the TP-Link powerline adaptor set back when, I tested whether it'd reach my garage and I remember it managing albeit at a pretty bad bandwidth. But for this? Who cares! Anyway, I replaced my garage door motor and today I wanted to IoT the sucker. Unfortunately, I get no connection anymore. Now tl;dr: Since my workshop is way closer, I was wondering whether the powerline adaptor there would act as an intermediary to extend my range. Problem is I cannot just buy a third adaptor... they're only available in a set of two and I'd hate to spend 150 bucks and then it doesn't work anyways...

I am more considering the fact that the antenna would be outside the phone. At this point I expect we have antenna design down pat so where else does the variance in reception quality between different smartphones come from? I mean there are variances between different models from the same vendor as well. Not to mention I carry my credit card in the phone case and I have it in an aluminum sleeve... so I expect that might shield the phone a bit as well or at least create interference.

Hi there! Just watched this video: It shows a few options about boosting signal transmission in a fixed area. The video always alludes to an external antenna having better reception than an internal one. So I've been googling and I came up short... so perhaps someone around here can tell me why people don't hack their smartphones and rig up an external antenna. Wouldn't it be possible to glue a wire coil, much like for NFC, to the back of your case and solder the leads to the antenna connections inside the phone? If it's not that easy, could someone enlighten me as to why?

I have taken a few steps to alleviate the issue. I have overclocked both the GPU (gained about 20% in points in Heaven benchmark) and the CPU (to 4.4GHz, although it will still crash in Prime95 after a while. However I need to mention here that I was having issues with this system for quite some time. Both RAM and mainboard are suspected of possible hardware issues). My FPS in game went from the aforementioned 20 to 24 to over thirty. So it's playable. I will see how much SLI will do for me and then call it a day. I may try replacing thermal compound with Grizzly Conductonaut. Just for the hell of it :D. Of course I don't expect much more performance but perhaps some better temps and stability.

If it's the VRAM, going SLI will probably not help... on the contrary, I guess.