PC Tech Thread

I'm really only familiar with windows so i'll likely stick to that. What nomenclature does the 8th gen CPUs follow? i3/i5/i7?

It's the first digit (or 2 digits in the case of tenth gen) after i3 or i5 or whatever.

E.g. i5-8250U is 8th gen.
i5-5250U is 5th gen.

That 8th gen is probably at least twice as fast as the 5th gen.
A modern i3 is often faster than an old i5.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ is a good site for comparing them. The old rule of thumb was that each stream to be transcoded would take about 2,000 of the CPU score. With the hardware decoding that may not exactly be the case now but it gives an idea.

@aggi @Velocio thanks!

how's this one look? Def a bit more than I wanted to spend so might hunt on ebay or wait for a deal...

https://www.ebuyer.com/882755-intel-nuc-bean-canyon-dual-core-8th-gen-i3-slim-barebone-mini-boxnuc8i3bek3

edit: just seen they don't come with memory, storage or OS installed. That'll drive up price. I can repurpose an old SSD for storage at least...

Sandy was spared

Sorry for the late reply but thanks @Velocio! But the damn min is now out of stock... 🤷🏻‍♀️

Does this sound like a virus or malware? Standard anti virus scan and cleans if no luck, a complete reinstall?

My neighbours were gonna ask a repair man to visit but it sounds like it could be a DIY job.

He is not tech at all and I am not going to visit him but should be able teach him what’s what over text / phone if it’s software?

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That would work great. You could get away with less but it's really the kind of thing where you want to set it up and leave it rather than having to think about upgrades, etc.

If you're reusing a drive be aware that some, such as the one you've linked, only take m2 drives and others take both m2 and 2.5". You can pick up a copy of Windows for £5-£10.

Me mentions a touch screen, it sounds like an issue with that.

Sounds to me like a knackered touchscreen or touchpad that is randomly clicking on stuff. First thing I'd try would be disabling that (may need to plug a mouse in).

Oh yeah, I missed the word touchscreen... 🤦🏻‍♀️

He has a couple of young kids. I think young kids and touchscreen don’t generally get on particularly well... 🤣

Touchscreen disabled. Happy days. Thanks!

re: Plex and all that... I've started using a lot of single board computers but not raspberry pi's

currently have:

ODroid C2 - Runs LibreElec for TV front end
Rock64 - Running DietPI for Pi-Hole
Rock64 - nothing atm, as I'm messing around with Arch Linux on it. Was VPN headend, since it has hardware encryption. Might convert to Android 9, as Netflix app on TV is buggy as hell
VIM3 - New, going to be running download setup. Has npu (Neural Processing Unit) so might get repurposed for learning about AI and the like
ZeroPi - New, going to be running Pi-Hole (not Raspberry Pi Zero, this thing is TINY and has ethernet) .. down side, coming from China with 5 week shipping time :(
Odroid C4 - Just ordered (released yesterday, coming from korea), to replace C2 as I want HDR etc...
Synology DS111 - legacy but still serving up files since I bought it new (1 drive)
i5 with multiple drives - OpenMediaVault server ... over kill since all it does is share folders.

If you don't need transcoding, I'd strong suggest SBC's rather than a nuc. Far less energy usage for one thing, and dirt cheap for another

Ah. That was my addiction

Until I realised it collectively cost as much as a good pc, didn't have the power of it, and now I was daisy chaining a lot of power from the ups device.

A single fanless pc is the sweet spot for me.

How long from order to dispatch? I paid for delivery today but I’ve not got a dispatch email yet 🙈

yeah my i5 is more than powerful to run all this stuff itself. It's in it's own room so I don't care about the fan/noise tbh.

Just really messing around with these little sbc's as a kinda hobby. The only one "required" would be the C2/C4 for driving the TV.

The only expensive SBC there is the VIM3 (~130$) but it was a gift. The rest collectively are about ~200$. I mean I don't need this many, tbh one Rock64 would run everything I need.

11 days order to delivery

Fuckinell

i've had 2 deliveries from scan in past 2 weeks both were here in 3 business days tops.

Mine took ages from Scan, kinda annoying but its here now, one problem though RAM wont run at 3600, I've enabled XMP in the BIOS but still not working.
CPU:3200g
MB:b450 Steel Legend
RAM: Corsair Vengence with them flashy lights 3600
Help me please

next inane tech question

if i have a NUC running 24/7 is a NAS even necessary? Couldn't I just run a HD enclosure instead?

You could do that.

A NAS is merely a low powered pc with some software to help configure the networking, permissions, etc of the storage.

If you're comfortable dealing with that then yes.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113924821333

This fits my budget reasonably well and from what I can tell, will tackle transcoding reasonably well?

will tackle transcoding reasonably well?

How to find out:

1. Find the CPU name, in this case i5-5250U
   
2. Google it
   
3. Look for the ark.intel.com link
   
4. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/84984/intel-core-i5-5250u-processor-3m-cache-up-to-2-70-ghz.html
   
5. Look for Intel® Quick Sync Video
   
   

In this case yes, that CPU has the feature so you can configure Plex for hardware transcoding. Doing it in hardware in the CPU rather than on software on the CPU means far less compute required to transcode which is what makes this a good CPU for transcoding video for Plex.

Yes is the answer.