Fluxmaven

Every time Performance PCs puts random cool stuff on their eBay store I throw out random low offers and they accept it... I kinda wish they wouldn't because I don't need more watercooling gear I also just bought a set of Klipsch R-41SA Atmos speakers... I haven't even upgraded my receiver to one with Atmos yet

I have commitment issues Really I just need to slip a GPU I'm not using into a rig that stays on all the time. I don't leave my watercooled rigs on 24/7 (which is most of my rigs). When I get around to redoing my Plex server, I'll try and get a linux VM setup with PCIe passthrough so I can run a card all the time. That aside, I'll be getting more points up regardless now that it's getting cooler. I'll shut the vents to the office and heat this room with folding power

That's weird I'd hit them up for a warranty replacement. I've had mine since they first came out because I wanted a cheap hot swap board to test switches. Never had an issue with it and it's been passed around as my loaner board to get friends into mechs for years now. Don't have any recommendations for off the shelf boards. I mostly use custom smaller boards with separate wrist rests.

Hi, good to see you as well. Your custom GMMK turned out really nice. Makes me want to dig mine out and mod it lol I've tried an actual HHKB and didn't like it because it was too light. I also have mixed feelings on the HHKB layout. My Rama board uses that layout and Its fine when I mostly use that setup but jumping between builds is weird since the layout is fairly different. Also Topre is nice but with all the different boutique switches these days it's easy to get an equally nice tactical feel for way less. I still want to try bke heavy domes in my Realforce but I'm more likely to build another custom board

a few years back I had surgery that required a catheter. I swear they found the burliest male nurse they could find going into it. When it was time to yank it out they brought out the hottest chick in the hospital. Happy endings aside, I hope everything goes smoothly for Jan

Looking good! Love a big external rad I like to clean rads with Mayhems Blitz kits. At the very least flush it out. Fill with hot water, cap off the ports and shake the everliving hell out of it. Flush again. Repeat till nothing comes out. You can also add a cheap car fuel filter just after the rad and run it for a while then remove before final assembly.

Yay now I can turn some of these rigs off. Hopefully by next time it will be cold outside so I can just open a window instead of running the AC which I was trying to avoid.

Just noticed I hit half a billi. Granted half of that is from folding under OCN or anon. When I hit the billion I'll frame it and hang it up at work just to confuse people.

RTX 2080, GTX 1080ti, 1070. I have also been running my 3090 off and on... We were kinda stupid and put the two spiciest rigs in the same room. So with my roommates dual 3090s rendering and mine folding the office gets unbearably hot.

Something's wrong if I'm at the top of the list. Where are all of our heavy hitters this month?

It's mentally taxing, expensive, and consumes a ton of time... but it's also kinda fun, so I'll see you in the Country Cup Thanks for putting up prizes. I wasn't expecting to win anything but it's definitely appreciated (and will go right back into acquiring more hardware)

Getting a couple rigs fired up now! It's been nice and cold all week until today... Hoping it cools off again so I can open the windows like I was planning.

The NVMe is just for the OS, all the NAS storage is spinning rust. Copying data to the NAS from PCs with 2.5G NIC is around 285MB/s. From 1G NIC its around 113MB/s. I'd be curious what these spinny boiz would do over 10 gig to remove the network bottleneck. I doubt writes would get much faster though.

I'm usually lazy and just follow up a wash with some Meguiar's Quik Wax. I have several others in the shelf of detailing stuff that are better like Griot's garage but I don't always want to take the time to do a paste wax. I haven't really dove into all the products out there like sealers and ceramics and whatnot. The mainstays in my arsenal are mostly just soaps and waxes

The paint on the Miata was getting a bit tired (also a black car) so I polished it for the first time this summer. I was scared to mess it up so I went with very non aggressive stuff first. Chemical Guys V36 cutting and V38 Final polish. They were pretty cheap on sale and gave me the confidence to try something a bit more aggressive and work my way back to the finer compounds. Picked up Meguiar's M10508 Mirror Glaze Ultra-Cut Compound and It seemed like a step in the right direction. I got impatient and started driving the car again. So now I want to start over and clay bar the car, go over again with the Meguiar's then the Chemical Guys stuff. I probably won't get any more Chemical Guys polish. I'll go with other Meguiar's stuff unless anyone else has any other good recommendations Post it. Sounds like it needs a decent amount of work and would be cool to see the progress.

Sorry, I said I'd run through everything when I got home from work but wasn't feeling great so I laid down to take a "quick" nap and was out for a couple hours. For convenience of moving things around I feel like quick disconnect fittings are a must. After doing plenty of research and now with years of experience using them my recommendation is to go with Koolance. They aren't cheap, but they work well and come in several different configurations. I did hear mixed reviews about the black fittings and picked some up anyway and the finish does chip off after you disconnect and reconnect a few times. Hasn't caused me any issues aside from looking a bit unsightly. For one of my builds I went with QD3 with 1/2x3/4' female ends and G1/4 male ends. I did this so I could hard mount one side to a metal bracket with passthroughs. This looks nicer when the rad is disconnected but it makes the loop totally useless unless the external is connected. I'll go over what I mean by that when I get to the next setup. I don't have any better pics of this but you can probably make out the line all the way around the fitting where the black finish chipped off. For my main setup I used a PCI passthrough bracket and ran a couple feet of tubing then put QD4 fittings with 1/2x3/4" on both male and female sides. Having the fittings halfway down the tubing is nice because I can separate the external setup from the PC and connect the ends together to fill and bleed each section separately since I have pumps on both. I have a D5 pump and two rads internally so I can use the system completely without the external setup If I want. Just a moment... WWW.DAZMODE.COM Here's a size comparison of QD3 and QD4. The QD4's are larger and have less flow restriction. For both of my setups I just ran long ass Molex power cables to fan controllers on the external setups. The one with a legit MO-RA3 uses an Aquacomputer Aquaero 5 pushing 4x 180mm. The other external setup is a Aquacomputer PowerAdjust3 Ultra into a Splitty9 with 9x Arctic P12. Not going into too much detail since it's an old controller they probably don't sell anymore but going non PWM made things even cheaper. Got the 3pin Arctic P12 value packs for $20 per 5 fans. I actually have a whole build thread on that setup so I won't clog up your thread any more posting all the pics from that but here's a link if you want to sift through that. Just a moment... WWW.OVERCLOCK.NET If I were going to mount the rad somewhere way further from the PC I'd run a little Mean Well PSU to power a D5 and a fan controller... Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/LRS-100-12-Switching-Supply-Single-Output/dp/B019GYOMN6/ref=sr_1_15?crid=8DVE10SU9FUF I'd rather cut the cables and wire up to something like that than to run a bunch of adapters to run it off a Molex wall adapter As far as fittings go, it's really just a personal preference thing. I have or have tried just about every major brand. I have stuck with mostly Bitspower and Monsoon. Cheaper fittings like Barrow work just fine but some of their rotary angle fittings can feel a bit sloppy. Bitspower has the tightest most reliable rotary fittings I've tried. I pretty much run 1/2x3/4" tubing (might see it listed as 13x19mm). It's thick and doesn't kink easily. I like Tygon A-60-G which is Norprene industrial tubing. It's hard to find, expensive, and overkill. Any EPDM tubing will be similar and equally low maintenance. I think I've rambled on long enough. Hopefully there's some useful info in there and as always just ask if you have any questions.

Inb4 big turbo and spicy e85 tune

Cable management on my main build goes by the out of sight out of mind philosophy. Takes 3 hands to get the back panel shut On this one I wanted it tidy for ease of access if I need to swap drives.

Just now seeing this and I'm not at my PC so I'm not going to write a whole novel but I have a couple different external setups (not including the ghetto HWBOT loop you've seen). Tomorrow after work I'll type up an overview of different options of what could work for your setup. Quick things to note, 1/2x3/4" tubing works well since it's thick walled and doesn't kink easily. Koolance QD4 quick disconnects are a good option for reliable QD fittings with minimal flow restriction. Another vote for P12's. Have had 9x of them on one of my external setups for 2+ years with zero issues.

I think people really overblow the must have ECC thing considering most people using this at home are likely just filling it up with "Linux ISOs"... If I were super concerned about the data, I wouldn't be using old parts bin consumer hardware with used HDDs. Most of the stuff that will live on here is backed up elsewhere or can be reacquired if something were to go terribly wrong.

This build is running Core which is fine considering I don't want to use this for anything but storage. My current Plex server is running Windows since it was doing double duty as my test bench as it was the only air cooled PC I owned Now that I have a separate test bench, it doesn't need to pull double duty so I'm considering reimaging it. Was originally thinking ESXi and run a couple VMs since that's what I'm more familiar with, but that build would be a better candidate for Scale.

Actually I forgot the Define 7 only comes with 4 HDD trays and I added 4 more which is why half are black and half are white. Paid $21.18 total for 2x kits the Type B drive trays. So really my total was $393.96 not bad for 20TB of fast usable space with some redundancy. We have Gigabit fiber to the house and all the PCs are connected via 2.5G switches which uplink to a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro

Figured I'd post the info on my budget NAS in case anyone was interested. Case: Fractal Define 7 black/white - picked up BNIB on FB marketplace for $100. It was a nice day so I took the Miata and it barely fit in the passenger seat Motherboard: Strix-Z270H - had this in the spare parts bin Cooler: Thermalright True Spirit 140 POWER - also in the spare parts bin CPU: i7 6700 - was free from a recycled PC RAM: 4x4GB 2133- also a recycle pull SSD: Toshiba 256GB NVMe - also a recycle pull PSU: EVGA 750 G6 that was bundled with a 3070 I "won" a Newegg shuffle for. Sold a 2080S for the same price as the bundle so the PSU was "free" HDD: 8x HGST Ultrastar 7200RPM 4TB drives - $216.24 on ebay (offered $25 per drive and it was accepted) HBA: LSI 9240-8i with the breakout cables - $45.25 on ebay NIC: 2.5G PCIe adapter - $11.29 on ebay OS: TrueNAS - Free go check it out TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era WWW.TRUENAS.COM TrueNAS is the World’s #1 Open Source Storage. Based on OpenZFS, it is trusted by millions and deployed worldwide. Total out of pocket for project: $372.78 Ideally I'd have used a different platform that supported ECC memory, but using all the stuff I had laying around kept the build really affordable.