PC Tech Thread

If the mobo has shifted and is touching the case it could be shorting out.

Check the Cmos battery is still in place properly too.

Bloody @Velocio not doing the screws up properly. :P

Cheers for the tips. I'll let you know how it goes.

CMOS battery could be flat... I mean, it's been years.

Yeah, seemed a bit coincidental with the move though. I reckon something has come loose or the powerboard is too shit for it. I'll check it all out though.

Water cooling is cool...

Spelt TK Maxx wrong, not sure why you need to know the distance to it tho.

Thats very impressive. Your max is lower than my min...

I know nothing about building computers, so i'm looking for some guidance...

I'm specing up a computer to run a plex server (this is all it will do, nothing else). I would prefer it to run windows as I can at least trouble shoot that, but beyond that I don't really know what I am looking for. Idea is to minimise the cost as well as ongoing running cost, so want something that can handle the transcoding but isn't massive overkill, anyone got any good starting points?!

My second hand i3 4330.
I built a decent set up for £350 including a GTX 950 card and Samsung SSD. Had never built a PC before. Got it running OS X and W10. All good fun.
I imagine any i3 can handle what you are after.
I don't really know too much though.

@Sam_w @chrisbmx116

I'd be very tempted by a cheap server.
Lenovo have been doing cashback for a while. Currently £125 on a '70A50022UK'
https://www.ballicom.co.uk/70a50022uk-lenovo-thinkserver-ts140-70a5.p1110065.html

So you'd get it for about £250. The CPU alone is about £200 (roughly = Core i5 4690)

It would be slight overkill, but it's a good starting point / consideration. And it's a great platform if you do upgrade the memory or put in an SSD after. Would be rapid.

I assume this is going to be an always on machine, is the data going to be on here as well or a separate network drive? I'd be tempted to go for something like the HP Microserver, they're proven and very stable http://www.ebuyer.com/722189-hpe-proliant-gen8-g1610t-4gb-ram-microserver-819185-421 and cheap to buy and run.

This should be able to cope with transcoding single 1080p streams but if you're intending to look at 4k or transcoding multiple streams you'd need to look at something more powerful.

You can install Windows or Linux or whatever on there

Cheers, will add it to the list...

Yes, will be always on. Ideally I would just ram a couple of 2tb drives in there (in raid?) and have all the data internally stored. Can't imagine doing 4k in the near future, as don't have any 4k devices!

That HP server too would be worth thinking about. Well worth it for £110, as is the Lenovo if you want to stretch the spec and get something beefier. Both lots of machine for the money

Cheers.

Anything I should be looking out for if I am putting hard drives in these, do I need certain level of spec given that they will be always on?

Edit: Something like this? http://www.ebuyer.com/514997-seagate-2tb-nas-hdd-3-5-sata-st2000vn000

I'm not sure tbh.
I would assume the transcoding would be CPU limited rather than HDD, though I've not used Plex, so will defer to @aggi ...

In general I put OS and Apps on an SSD, and vids on a [spinning] HDD
So probably Plex and any working/transcoding directory on an SSD, and then something like what you linked for the bulk of the videos

I run a Plex server.

And I run a NAS.

I would definitely recommend making this distinct things, and not the same box.

The NAS should do nothing other than manage a number of drives, ensure that there is enough parity (data duplicated in case a disk fails), and keep the data on the drives available to the network.

From a NAS with a small number of drives (4 or fewer) look for hardware RAID5. This allows for 1 disk to fail in it's entirety and your data is still going to be OK. It's also very fast for reading data, which is good for media. Of course, if a drive can fail and you still have data this means that you don't get full capacity... if you put 4 x 3TB drives in there for 12TB total, only 3 x 3TB are actually usable... so you'll have 9TB of space.

If you go for a NAS with more than 4 disks, then start looking at RAID6. This allows for 2 drives to fail without causing data loss. It gets expensive at this point.

Off the shelf NAS is decent enough, QNAP do some nice gear. It is possible to beat the price by about a 3rd... not off the disks, but of the enclosure and software. Look at FreeNAS and google some guides. In real terms it means you can save £100 or so, but will invest a lot of time and energy to do so.

As for the Plex media server. There are things it needs, and things it doesn't need. It does need a good CPU as it will be encoding quite a bit so that media suits various screen sizes or bandwidth requirements. It will need a few GB of RAM as it runs a database... but if you have a NAS then the whole of the Plex server can just be run on a single small SSD with Windows, in a small media PC.

Spec CPU high, spec RAM medium, spec disk low.

No, it is just the American version-

http://tjmaxx.tjx.com/store/index.jsp

Cheers, as always you seem to know what I need more than I do!

I suspect I shall do this in stages, so will spec the NAS box first, then move onto a plex box, I have a few old machines floating round the office so might be able to use one of those...

looking at the QNAP stuff, would one of these do the trick or would you recommend a higher spec version?

Oh, and the HP Microserver is loved by people here... that's good for a NAS too.

Though it tends not to be used for a Plex server, as the default CPUs (Celerons) are great for NAS but really kinda crappy for transcoding.

You won't notice it when you're just viewing a single video stream, but as soon as you get to "multiple 1080p streams" it will struggle.

This is pretty much why splitting the NAS from the Plex server makes sense... each thing wants different specs. NAS requires nothing but great disk and power management and an enclosure, whereas the media server is all CPU and a bit of RAM and who cares about disk and power so much.

That is pretty much perfect for your usage.

As for disks... go for size now, don't buy all of the disks from the same manufacturer and from the same batch. i.e. if you really insist on buy all Seagate or Western Digital drives... order 2 from one supplier, 1 from another, 1 from another.

Disks made at the same time, and with the same spec, tend to fail at the same time. RAID5 will give you protection against a single disk failure, but don't push your luck by buying identical disks from the same production batch that will likely fail at the same time. Just mix it up, so long as the capacity is the same there is nothing stopping you mixing producers either... feel free to mix Samsung with Seagate, etc.

I would have walked straight into that trap! I will spec 4 x 3tb from different manufacturers and lob them into the qnap box.

Will then spec a fast processor small box with just an SSD to run plex off.

One last question... will the Plex server be just a Plex server?

i.e. will it be in a basement, and other clients connect to it?

Or will you be connecting this to the primary TV in house that happens to be a 4k beast, and on the Plex server you'll also run Plex Media Theater?

If the former, the graphics card is irrelevant, if the latter than you'll want a decent graphics card that can be passively cooled when not in use.

I went with this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-Nvidia-Graphics-Cards-128-Bit/dp/B00UMVCYTM

It's got hardware decoders for the core video codecs you're likely to have, and the large fans are silent when it's hot, and when it's cold it's decent enough to turn the fans off entirely (saves power, keeps the room silent).

But this is not needed if the Plex server is not going to be connected to a TV. Mine is connected to a 4K TV and so I went for a 4K graphics card that can be silent.