Maverickfftytwo

Hey, it just works

That was it! Thank you very much! I didn't even notice there was a headset or headphone option!

So the motherboard in my PC is a Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX Mini ITX, and it has onboard wifi & BT. The headphones I have are Audio-Technica ATH-SR6BTBK. I know BT isn't the pinnacle of sound quality, and I'm not expecting it to be, but when I use my BT headphones with my PC the sound quality is garbage compared to when I connect them to my cell phone (LG V60) or tablet (Samsung S6 Lite). It's like I'm suddenly listening to music through a tin can and the speaker is 1000 miles away. If I play the music over my desktop speakers (Creative Pebble speakers) it sounds just fine, and if I plug the headphones into the speaker jack they sound just fine as well. Literally the only time the headphones sound bad is when they are connected to the PC via bluetooth. In all cases I'm listening to music from Spotify, but it's also the same difference if I watch a Youtube video or any kind of audio content at all. I'm assuming there is some kind of setting in Windows that adjusts the sound quality via bluetooth, but I can't seem to find anything that has made a difference. If anybody could help me out with this I'd be really grateful. This my work PC so I'm at it 8+ hours a day and I can't always listen to music, podcasts, etc. over the speakers. If I'm only listening to Spotify I can get around the issue by pairing the headphones with my phone/tablet and controlling spotify from my desktop app, but for things like Youtube it isn't practical to play the video on screen and also listen via the phone/tablet while it also is displaying the video the entire time, it really should just work correctly with the PC.

Well I got it to boot. I'm not sure why it worked, but it worked so fuck it... In the BIOS I went into the SATA settings and saw there was a "NVME Raid mode" set to disabled, so I enabled it. By itself that didn't do anything, but I noticed a new menu option in the BIOS for RAID config and when I went into that I could see that it was identifying the drive. Went through some of the menus in there and saw a an option to "initialize" the drive so I went ahead and did that. After that was done I booted to my Windows install USB, cleared the partitions from the previous install, did a fresh install...and it works.

Bumping this because I'm still stumped. Really hoping somebody has an idea.

Burned the firmware .iso to a DVD, booted to it, it doesn't detect any devices to update. Crystal Disk sees it. Windows sees it. The BIOS sees it (only with CSM enabled). Samsung Magician and their firmware software don't though...

So, Samsung Magician doesn't see the drive. Windows does. It shows up under "this PC" reports itself correctly under properties, etc. I can move files onto it, delete them, use them, whatever. I popped the m.2 into another PC and I can use it fine in that one as well, although that PC is old and doesn't support booting from NVME so I couldn't check that. I pulled the CMOS battery on the motherboard just to see if it would help, it didn't. I'm attempting to update the firmware on it now. Since Magician won't see it I can't update it that way, so I've got the firmware .iso from Samsung's website and now I have to find a optical drive and another SATA cable to try and get that working...

I've ran the windows installer about three times on that drive just to see. Same result. I've got the SATA drive on it now, windows installed fine to that and it's booting to the SATA drive so I'm going to install Samsung Magician then reboot it with the m.2 installed again and just double check the m.2 SSD. I just can't believe it will report in the BIOS and let Windows partition it and install to it and something about it wont let it boot. I'm thinking it has to be something in the BIOS or a motherboard issue...

Yes, and set to the 1st spot in the boot priority.

I'm putting together a computer for one of my kids from used parts I've found for sale locally. Here is what I have so far... ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming motherboard Ryzen 3400G CPU Samsung 960 Pro 2TB SSD Crucial Ballistix 2x4GB 2400Mhz RAM Corsair 650W PSU I put it all together, plugged it in, turned it on, and it posts into the BIOS no problem. Bios sees my m.2 drive, etc. Plugged in my Windows install USB, the installer see's the m.2 just fine, do a clean install, when it finishes it reboots but instead of booting into Windows and finishing the setup it boots back to my USB. If I remove the USB and try booting to the m.2 SSD I get the "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message. The BIOS version of the mobo was 3103, but I updated it to 4301 and saw no change. Everything appears to be working as it's all reporting correctly and even the windows installer was able to access and partition the ssd, I just can't seem to figure out why it's not booting to Windows. I've looked through a lot of the BIOS settings and I can't seem to find anything that looks obvious, it all looks like it's set correctly. Any ideas? edit: I haven't tried a SATA drive yet, but I'm about to just to see what happens.

The primary cost is in drives. I repurposed a AsRock H77 PRO4/MVP motherboard, i5-3570, and 16GB of G.Skill DDR3 1600Mhz from a rig that I replaced. Picked up a Antec P101 Silent for $90, bought a new PSU for $127, picked up a LSI 9207-8i HBA for $60, got two breakout cables for the HBA for $26, bought a Sandisk Cruzer Fit thumbdrive for $9. So $312 for the hardware. If I build a second one as a backup I'll use one of those AsRock motherboards with the Celeron CPU built in. Those are $70-80 plus another $20-30 for DDR4 RAM (which I actually have some spare...) so even if I didn't have a motherboard/CPU/RAM combo sitting around it would only be like $400-450ish. Remember, I'm not running VM's or dockers so I don't need beefy hardware. The case has eight 3.5" bays, and I've started populating those by buying 10TB hard drives which are about $250 a piece (if you can catch a sale) so after I get all eight that will be $2000 for the drives. I want to add two SSD's as a cache drives as well, so that will push it towards $2200ish. Unraid license is $59 to $129. Now in your case you have drives already, so it really boils down to if you also already have hardware or if you want to try and acquire hardware cheap. For reference, you could buy a Mediasonic ProBox 8 Bay 3.5" SATA External Hard Drive Enclosure for around $270 and that would be a DAS, or for the same kind of capacity you could pick up a 8 bay Synology NAS for around $800 but with your drives being all different sized you're going to lose capacity even with Synology Hybrid Raid. This is why I went with Unraid and PC based hardware. Price wise it's comparable, the hardware is replaceable and upgradeable, it doesn't need to be directly connected to my workstation taking up desk space like a DAS, and most importantly I can "add drives as needed" without any issues. I can literally set it up out of the way, let it run, and just keep shoving data onto it until I need more space. Then I just order another HDD, put it in, and keep going. The HDD doesn't even have to be any particular size because if I buy a bigger drive than my parity drive I can just make the new drive a parity drive and then convert the old parity drive to a data drive. IIRC, those full size Dell Optiplex's had a decent amount of drive bays. You can get those pretty cheap, add in a Unraid license, and boom you'll have your issue solved likely for less than the cost of that DAS.

If you want to reduce the footprint of your desktop PC's I'd recommend small form factor builds for the gaming PC's, and Intel NUC's or AsRock DeskMini's for the non-gaming PC's. The NUC's or DeskMini's can be VESA mounted behind the monitor to give a more "all in one" feel to the workspace, without many of the downsides of actual all-in-one systems. The gaming PC's will hold you hostage to space due to the GPU. The only other alternative I can think of for saving space would be the desk PC's LTT is so fond of, but that's quite the project and expense.

Is it expensive? Even if you bought the $130 top tier OS it's going to pale in comparison to the cost of the hardware. When I'm done populating my basic desktop based unraid server with drives it will have cost me about $2600 total, and that is with using some "free" hardware left over after upgrading my gaming rig. I don't need a ton of cores or RAM to run VM's or dockers, I just need storage space. It would easily be over $3000 if I needed new hardware with lots of cores and RAM. And realistically, if I wanted to bite the bullet and buy all of my drives right now I would be in the perfect situation to one of the free solutions as all of my drives would be the same size. In your case, with such a variety of drive sizes, unraids ability to "mix and match" drives should be quite the value as it would prevent a lot of hassle for you and it seems you've already saved quite a bit by being able to repurpose those drives instead of buying all new matching drives.

Look into Unraid. Your system is pretty similar to an old system that I have and I am going to be using unraid for photo storage.

Bad deal. IIRC you could get those for $50 cheaper prior to the RTX 3000 release, which is when we've seem a climb in used GPU prices. I know the regular 1070 hybrids were slightly under $200 and crept up $50 or so for sure.

So I put together an older/budget PC for the family to do some gaming on. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a good deal on a monitor and I've been using a 32" 1080p TV in the mean time, and it just isn't that great as a monitor. PC specs are: i5-4590k overclocked to 4.5GHz and with a 240mm AIO water cooling setup 16GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM GTX 1660 Super Right now the main game I've been playing is Hell Let Loose. I'm really more of a console gamer so I really only play PC games I can't play on console, so I'm probably not going to try playing many AAA titles on PC. I've been looking at some of the 27-32"1440p 144hz options, but I've also wondered if I would just be better off with a 4k 60hz monitor. The way I see it, while the 1660S is a pretty decent budget card I'm not that confident that at high(ish) graphics settings I'll see frame rates high enough at 1440p to really take advantage of a 144hz panel. So if I'm lowering graphics settings I feel like I could get even more clarity by going with a 4k (60hz) panel. I also saw some smaller (than the 32" I'm using now) 1080p 144hz panels which I think would be the only way I take advantage of 144hz while not turning down the graphics settings. I'm not sure how much of an improvement it would be though, I assume at least a little because it's pretty obvious to me that I'm sitting way too close to the 32" 1080p TV. It's easy to see the individual pixels. I also have a work PC that I played a couple matches of Hell Let Loose on for comparison. The specs on that are: Ryzen 3700X 32GB of DDR4 3600MHz RAM GTX 1660 Super A 34" ultrawide from MSI that's resolution is 5120 x 2160 (They call it 5k2k but it's essentially a 4k ultrawide) and 60hz It seemed like playing at 1440p or 4k was a huge improvement in clarity (I should try 1080, but I haven't yet) and while the FPS certainly took a hit I found that the game was still playable, especially after dialing back the graphics.

I know you have the Ryzen CPU already, but personally I would skip the GPU for transcoding and just use a Intel chip with integrated graphics. Also, if you don't already know you will need a Plex pass to utilize hardware transcoding with the GPU or CPU. I'm running my Plex server from an Intel NUC with a Celeron J4005 and I can transcode about four 1080p streams simultaneously. Unless you're trying to be the neighborhood Netflix I imagine you wouldn't need that many simultaneous transcode streams very often. Remember, it's best to use direct play with your media anyways and on your local network you will have plenty of bandwidth. If you are trying to be the neighborhood Netflix, you might be limited by your upload speeds before any hardware limitations. Check into it. The X factor for me is the Minecraft server. I have no idea if that would demand other requirements as I've never messed with it.

I recently built a new PC and my kids are inheriting the old rig to play around on. It's running Windows 10 on a i5-4690K OC'd to 4.4GHz (might try to bump it up a bit more) with a 240mm AIO water cooler, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, a 500w PSU, and the HD 7850 2GB that is currently OC'd to 1200MHz core 1450 MHz memory @ 1.225V (from 920MHz core & 1200MHz memory @ 1.14V). I'm using MSI Afterburner for the overclocking. The problem is, I think I can get more out of the card (based on the fact temps are fine, 68C at full load) but I'm running into an issue with the Radeon Adrenaline software and "Radeon Wattman" resetting the card to factory clocks if I try to bump it any higher. Seeing as the card is 8 years old I don't really care about it's longevity anymore. I'd like to be able to push it a little further but I can't seem to figure out how to get the Radeon software to leave me alone, and I'm no longer able to increase voltage (I read that AMD says 1.3V is the absolute max) in MSI Afterburner which I think will be necessary. I'm running out of experience & knowledge in this arena and I was hoping somebody could help me out with pushing this card to it's literal limit. I was just hoping to make some of the more modern games playable at 1080p without having to turn the graphics all the way down. So far the OC I have going has helped a ton but bumping it up a little more would be excellent.

Puget systems has lots of benchmarking info for some pro apps. They have the Adobe stuff which I was mainly interested in and depending on the tasks you're doing it can swing Intel or AMD. Although, AMD always seemed to be more cost effective. Nvidia is almost always the go to for pro apps, they've penetrated the industry better while AMD has offered gaming value for the most part.

Then it sounds like a NAS is the best route to go. I can access my Synology NAS from anywhere, and you can even create users and control their access. It's designed for exactly what you want, customer support will be available, and it'll even have a warranty. A full blown server is overkill and you're going to waste a ton of time trying to 3d print one that will work. That's a project you do for fun, not out of necessity.

Thanks for the reply! It's really easy to overkill simple things like this so I appreciate you recognizing that I'm not asking this thing to handle the kind of work load I need my 3700x work PC for, lol. Still, you're probably right that I'm going a little too conservative with the Pentium, even if it were just from a price to performance aspect and not outright performance. The Celeron J4005 handling things as well as it did gave me quite a bit of confidence in not needing to go big with the CPU.

As I mention in the OP I will only consider adding the GPU if I find the CPU struggling to keep up. I don't really expect that. I'm glad we're on the same page about the ideal setup omitting the GPU. The 9100 is the CPU I originally considered. Although it is 2x the cost of the Pentium, but as they're both fairly cheap that isn't a huge difference in the budget. I'll probably buy the 9100 if I feel like spending the extra cash when it comes time to buy, but for now I wanted to plan around the Pentium. That's the plan if I run Windows. I'm currently running Windows on the NUC and it seems fine, but Linux (unraid probably) does seem like the better route. So far my only experience with Linux is a Retropi, and IMO that barely counts. Backblaze has worked well when I've tested it, thanks for the advice though! It is important to verify.

Budget (including currency): Price conscious but flexible. Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex Media Server 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): My Plex server is currently an Intel NUC7CJYH (Celeron J4005 CPU) with 4GB of RAM, a 250GB Samsung SSD, and a 1TB Western Digital external HDD. I also have a 4TB 3.5" Western Digital Green internal HDD in a FIDECO external HDD enclosure that I plan to add to it soon, but I'm currently organizing and removing data from this drive onto my Synology NAS, I'm doing this as the 1TB drive is almost full. Also, I have a lifetime Plex Pass so hardware transcoding is available to me. Most of my media is 1080p and h.264. My current Plex server solution was a bit of an eBay special (as in it wasn't something I was intending to implement, but I got a great deal on it) and it's serving it's role very nicely. Every member of my household can have their device streaming from Plex without any issues, IIRC the CPU load gets up to 60-80% when doing that. My main issue with it and my desire for upgrading is that my path forward for increasing my storage revolves around external drives, and I don't really want to keep collecting external drives like I'm currently doing. They clutter up my entertainment center area where everything is setup. My only other issue is that I would like to extend the use of my Plex server to close family or friends (like 3 or 4 households) and I'm not sure how well the NUC could handle the potential additional load. So, due to all that, here's what I'm looking at putting together. CPU: Intel Pentium Gold G5420 3.8 GHz Dual-Core Processor ($64.03) Motherboard: ASRock H370M-ITX/ac Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard ($109.99) Memory: Crucial Ballistix 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR4-2400 CL16 Memory (Purchased For $0.00) Storage: Western Digital Blue SN550 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($39.99) Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 6 GB OC Video Card ($0.00) Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case ($86.98) Power Supply: Fractal Design Ion SFX-L 500 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply ($99.99) Total: $400.98 Here are my reasons for my choices so far... CPU: It has Intel Quick sync for transcoding and it's inexpensive while also being much more powerful than the Celeron J4005 that I'm currently using. I figure it should handle things and if not I could upgrade CPU's or use GPU transcoding. Motherboard: It simply has enough SATA ports to populate all the drive bays available in the case. The only other motherboard I see that also does is the Z390M version of this board and it's more than twice the price. Memory: I already have this RAM as a leftover from another build. Storage: Boot drive & metadata storage. Using a NVME drive doesn't disable a SATA port according to ASRock's user manual. Video Card: I have this with a $0 price tag because I don't actually plan to purchase it, at least right off the bat. This is a placeholder for if I decide to move to GPU transcoding. I need to see the actual usage of the server before I would buy this. Case: It looks good, it's small, and it appears to have nice airflow for all the components. Most importantly, it can have six 3.5" hard drives in it. Power Supply: Same PSU I used in another build and I liked it. I figure going with SFX over ATX will give a little more room for cables, the GPU, and air flow. For hard drives I'll probably start out by just putting my WD Green 4TB drive in it for storage, but from there I can add whatever. I'm planning to just use the drives as a single storage pool and not a RAID setup. It's not irreplaceable data that I always need access to so I figure a periodic backup is good enough. I currently have a Backblaze B2 subscription which allows me to backup unlimited data from a single PC for like $10 a month. Currently it's installed on my work PC and if I mount the NAS as a drive on my work PC I can backup both. I figure something similar can be done with the Plex server and that way I'll have a backup in case of a drive failure, but again it's not irreplaceable data so it's not that big of a deal. So what do you think? I know I could go much more powerful from this point but it seems like that might be overkill considering what's working currently. Price wise this is already a bit more of an investment than the $100 I spent on the NUC (ready to run) but I think it gives me a ton of flexibility moving forward, and I think it should allow me to share my server without worry.

I use about half those apps and I recently built a new mITX work PC. I went with a 3700x for the CPU, and while it's no slouch the 3900X or 3950X are certainly better options. You just have to keep them cool and that can be difficult depending on how tiny your case is. I went with 2x 16GB 3600mhz sticks of RAM (Crucial Ballistix) and for me 32GB is acceptable. I haven't ran out or anything but when I'm really working I've seen RAM usage in the mid 20's. I went with a B550 motherboard, Gigabyte AORUS, seems fine. Had everything I needed except the USB-C header for the front panel. I went with a Samsung 500GB m.2 SSD as a boot drive & application drive with a 2TB Western Digital m.2 SSD as my storage/working drive. The Samsung is NVME and the WD is SATA, both are plenty fast with large file transfers. I only went with a GTX 1660 Super as from the benchmarks I was looking at I wouldn't see a huge improvement in my workflow going with a RTX series card. It just wasn't worth the cost increase. Since I do have a less powerful card I also only went with a 550W PSU, from Fractal Design. Stuffed it all in Fractal's ERA ITX case. My only suggestion to your build is to double check that the 2060 will be alright for CAD, might be better looking at a Quadro but I don't do much CAD stuff so it wasn't a priority in my research. Regardless, I'm sure it's an upgrade from his last workstation. Mine is crazy fast compared to my old Ivy Bridge work PC. Tasks that took the old i5-3570 15 minutes to complete now only take a minute or two with the 3700x.

If all you're going to do is file storage just buy a pre-built NAS and add hard drives to it, a full blown server is overkill. Something like a Synology DS220j or Western Digital My Cloud with some 6TB NAS drives meets your budget, and can even be upgraded with larger drives or used for more than just a file server down the road if you want. Use in RAID 1 for redundancy if you feel it's required, or use it in RAID 0 with a cloud backup to take full advantage of your 12TB. However, I also don't necessarily see why your data needs to be network accessible if it's simply for storage. For your $500 budget you could buy a pair of 12TB external drives. Back them up to the cloud or to each other, depending on your preference. You could even have one at your house and one at a buddies so that you have off site backup.