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speculatrix

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  1. Great idea, start a discussion where people can pose tech trivia questions to make one big quiz.
  2. In the videos, I see the team all using different headphones which they'll have chosen for different reasons. I propose a blind listening test. Each person in turn is blindfolded and listens to their choice of music on all the headphones in a randomised order. They give a rating to each pair for quality and comfort. They also try and guess which is their own pair. At the end, LTT announce the best quality ones, and also the best value ones.
  3. There's a great Black Friday sale on at Amazon with the i3-10100 down to £90, which according to camelcamelcamel is as good as it's ever been. hmm, but now ebuyer.com have the 10100F for only £76. Total system cost * i3-10100F * Gigabyte B460 ATX HD3 (full size, more PCIe slots), * Crucial DDR4 kit 2x4GB, * The lowest code cheapest 80+ efficiency PSU (400W, far more than enough) is a BeQuiet! comes in at a total of £240 with cheapest shipping option. hmm, decisions, decisions.
  4. Budget (including currency): GB£300 for motherboard, CPU and RAM and PSU. Country: UK Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: TV Headend server with transcoding of video, plus streaming (DLNA) with transcoding Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): I'm about to build a new linux box for running TVHeadend, kitted with two TBS cards for DVB-S/S2 satellite reception (total of four tuners). Most of the time the box will be idle, and even when actively making a recording of radio or TV it won't be heavily loaded. However, if it starts streaming and simultaneously transcoding video, then the performance will spike, and a GPU will make a big difference - my existing * box has a 2nd gen core-i3 and intel quicksync reduced the transcode time to one third. My first thought is to get the fairly new i3-10100 CPU which is much more powerful than the existing i3-2xxx, and should therefore be able to return to idle more quickly. But the base clock speed is still pretty fast, so I imagine it will still consume a decent amount of power when idling. Can I underclock? Would it be worth waiting for the forthcoming AMD 4300G or 4300GE to get a better GPU, the TDP on the GE is 35W, half that of the Intel. Does the motherboard make much of a different for power efficiency? I would need to buy an ATX board to get sufficient PCIe slots to allow for future expansion, e.g. put in another DVB-S2 card and/or a DVB-T/T2 card for terrestrial TV. If the machine idles at, say, 30W, that's GB£40 a year in electricity, and I intend to leave this running "forever", so it's worth spending extra for reliability and efficiency. thanks for any ideas. Paul * existing frankenstein system was one built from bits my employer was throwing out: i3-2100, random RAM sticks that hadn't failed, a couple of HDDs in RAID1 because they'd been in use constantly for three years, a random case, and not particularly efficient PSU.
  5. I recently wanted to create a new Hackintosh, and found it was really easy to use the tools from this github repo: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM you don't even need a mac to get the install image. my only suggestion would be that if you can spare the disk space, use a raw disk image and now qcow2, as the latter seems to be really slow, even on an i7-8th with a good nvme SSD as backing store.
  6. thanks, some great ideas so far. @mariushm the ryzen3000 sounds pretty interesting. I tried live streaming from the TVH server to a chromecast and with software transcoding it just about kept up, using an entire core to do so, so I reckon hardware support would make a big difference, both in terms of performance and reducing the power used by the CPU.
  7. Hi, I'm currently using a core-i3 second gen desktop, which was given to me from someone's scrap pile, to run TVHeadend, a TV streaming server, in which I have a twin tuner DVB-S2 satellite receiver card. It's old, it's noisy, and its drives are old and I don't know how long they'll run for (they're Seagate Barracuda 250G 3.5" drives, about ten years old, from a scrapped server!). I built it as a proof of concept so I could see how well TV Headend would work. I now plan to replace it with something more modern. I already have a quiet power supply so that's a start. This machine will be left on 24x7, so I want is something that is very efficient and idles at a very low power, but has good performance if I am streaming video and/or transcoding it - I have found that the Intel HD GPU will accelerate transcoding from the mpeg2 format used for non-HD transmissions quite well, so I imagine that a full core-i3 with GPU is probably going to be suitable. I think that Ryzen is a fair bit more power hungry? I'd be wanting a full ATX motherboard with three or more PCIe x1 slots for TV tuners. As a linux box, it will boot to a text console, and it will spend its life in the attic near where the cables come in from the satellite dish or tv aerial. My problem is that whilst power consumption is published for the CPU and drives and such, I don't know whether the power consumption for motherboards varies a lot. I would guess that the fewer SATA and USB ports the better, within reason?! thanks for any thoughts, Paul
  8. I stumbled on this: https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2019/06/macos-qemu-guest/ might make setting up a hackintosh easier?
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