- 0 Posts
- 95 Comments
1·8 days agoI’m with you that he doesn’t strictly need a gpu, but if the price is right (free from old gaming PC, cheap from a friend’s old gaming PC, cheap old workstation card, etc) I stand by that he probably wants one. A lot less fussy, a lot more capable, nad nvenc does better quality encoding at lower bitrates (and probably less power too if you take into account time spent encoding at full tilt.)
Generally power supplies are the most electrically efficient at 20-60% utilization, so there’s no issue with over-provisioning power, other than the (generally minor) upfront extra cost, which might very well pay for itself in the first months/years of usage. I’ll take a look and see what I can find on those sites.
Edit: okay, trying to shop through google translate / currency calculator is actually aids so I’m gonna teach a man to fish instead. This is what I should have done from the start anyway.
Power supply: Anything from a decent brand, at basically anything >450W. a 650W or 850W is totally fine if it’s at a decent price. They only draw the power they need, they don’t just constantly pull 850W if the downstream components aren’t calling for it.
CPU: 12400 is a fine cpu for what you’re doing. You’ll transcode at 720p no problem, 1080p maybe a single stream in real-time. I wouldn’t bank on more than that. Only downsides here are the relatively shallow core counts if you ever expanded into other workloads. Without access to used xeon boards/cpus, it might be a reasonable choice though. What I would say is look for something older but with more cores/threads if you can. For example, a 10900 or even 10700k would probably be a better server cpu than a 12400.
Memory: DDR4 platforms are a great way to save money, as long as you aren’t planning on expanding to inferencing on cpu. Get as much as you can. 32-64gb of ddr4 should be dirt cheap, especially if you find a cheap motherboard with 4 memory sockets.
Motherboard: If you want this thing to be versatile, you want 2x pci-e slots. Old gaming full-sized ATX boards are the way to go here. 1 slot for an HBA, 1 slot for a GPU, and that should be all you need. Bonus for as many open sata sockets as possible. 6-8 is pretty typical on 10th-12th gen gaming ATX boards.
GPU: gpus will be much more efficient at transcoding than an igpu, especially from older intel CPUs. A 1050, 2060, 3050, basically anything from the 10-series onward has a decent nvenc encoder that would work well with plex/jellyfin. My goto is generally old workstation cards, I use a p620 myself and it handles a single 4k encode job no problem. I’m not sure if they’re viably purchasable anywhere in your area, but I’d definitely look out for a P620, P1000, or T400. Great value in those cards.
Drives/HBA: there are inexpensive LSI HBA cards to expand how many drives you can attach to a system if you need them, all you need is a spare pci-e slot and a place to physically mount the drives. The cheapest way to start here is to look for a motherboard with 4-6 sata slots and use those. Hardware raid is functionally dead these days in the real world, just use zfs or mdadm under linux to create an array with your desired level of resiliency/capacity.
Once you’ve priced out what it would cost to buy all of this new, look for prebuilt gaming PCs and office PCs that might be able to be expanded to fit these requirements. Prices look kind of steep on those markets you listed, but I’m sure something exists if you look hard enough.
An example of this:
Bitcoin mining started on cpus, then moved to gpus, and now exists on dedicated asics.
A $200 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the ASIC is going to be a faster sha256 calculator
A $2000 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the GPU is going to be a faster sha256 calculator
A $200 GPU from today vs a $200 ASIC from 10 years ago vs a $200 CPU from today?.. You get the idea.
There’s no way to know without specific details which will be faster. You could be running software encryption on a raspberry pi from 5 years ago or the drive could be running an encryption ASIC from 10 years ago, etc
The short answer is that: all other things being equal, it will always be faster and cheaper to do things dedicated in hardware. Comparing one implementation to another, however, is always going to be an “it depends”
11·13 days agoI am also curious
Remote assistance is not rdp, it’s Microsoft’s support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.
The rest of that I’ll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.
I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn’t be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the “which apps are preventing shutdown” dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.
It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.
Was backtrack before or after whoppix?
I’d say that the ctt winutil does a pretty good job. I’ve been running installs cleaned by it for a good year now without major issues
3·2 months agoI think that holds true in this case… but I’ll be damned if the ltt screwdriver isn’t the best hand tool I’ve ever owned.
1·2 months agoWhen ML training farms run out of new text to train on, “they” may very well want your original writing too…
Me too brother, but I disagree with your assessment on value
An non-blacklisted residential IP address with reasonable throughput is valuable in and of itself. DDOS botnets, proxies to bypass geo blocks or to obfuscate illicit traffic, etc. Also your gaming PC could be used for distributed compute workloads of compromised, usually crypto mining.
Any hardware/connection has value if it’s “free”. It’s just a numbers game beyond that.
For now, ctt winutil does a pretty good job at removing the cruft. I’ve long since switched to debian for my daily driver, but as a remote-access sunshine host for games that require kernel level anticheat, it’s surprisingly usable.
For anyone looking to keep windows around in some capacity, I strongly recommend it. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Every packet you send/receive relies on passive security. Your nic drivers, the driver kernel model, all of the userland applications that sit on top of it. I get that in practical terms, your firewall will do a lot of the heavy lifting but there are passive rce vulnerabilities in previous unsupported versions of Windows that are trivially exploitable today.
Even if you trust their intent to not misuse your data, there are now a lot of live rpc hooks into your operating system, controllable by anyone who can compromise their azure implementation, which has happened at least twice in recent memory. If the data never leaves your device, and they didn’t have a way in, they wouldn’t have those things to lose in the first place.
The interdependency itself, regardless of intent, is inherently more dangerous than the previous separate paradigm that used to exist.
Your dad probably got lucky, and your router’s firewall probably did a lot of the heavy lifting. If you were to connect a win 2000/XP computer to the internet today without a firewall between, it would be compromised in minutes (there are loads of videos of people demoing this).
While I don’t have proof that 7 would be the same, I strongly suspect it would be the same. 10 will get there soon too. Firewalls will stop most of the low hanging fruit, but an application that bridges connections through the firewall are that much more vulnerable to exploitations that won’t be integrated by your running kernel.
I wrote and maintain a zero-to-working SAP HANA/S4 installer in pure bash.
It takes a redhat compatible from base install to a working, production-ready SAP system in about 5 hours.
It’s like ~9,000 lines of bash