Tech Thread - PCs - Networking - Etc

[ohioyj]

Anyone else mess around with tech stuff. It's another one of my "problems."

Recently decided to upgrade my firewall. Picked up a ASRock NUC BOX-155H (Intel I7 machine) to replace my current Intel NUC with. Plenty overkill for OPNsense:



I liked the way this one was built, the RAM and SSDs all have built in heatsinks:





Just runs my home network, which is mostly wired:

[Dark6]

I can't seem to keep up with it.
old people problems....

[Aaron Coomer (3.504)]

my deepest understanding of technology is: yes, it exists.

[ohioyj]

I can't seem to keep up with it.
old people problems....

I don't claim to be an expert. I know just enough to be dangerous.

Another recent project for us was replacing my son's desk. We looked at various things, and didn't find anything that was quite what we needed, or anything he liked. So we decided to build one:



All completed:

[Aaron Coomer (3.504)]

thats awesome! looks great

[ohioyj]

This was a fun one. After admitting I didn't have room for MAME cabinet, I decided to built some arcade style controllers. Playing arcade games on Xbox controllers just isn't the same. Just some simple plywood boxes:



Stained and polyurethaned:



It looks like a bunch of wiring, but it's really not, and really only goes into one place. The screws with washers have spacers under them are there to keep the wire from coming unplugged.



All finished:

[Aaron Coomer (3.504)]

you'll need a CRT monitor to go with those bad boys.

[ohioyj]

you'll need a CRT monitor to go with those bad boys.

I have an old XP machine stashed away. However a CRT monitor is one thing I have not kept. I primarily do play on emulators these days. However somethings aren't quite the same and you just need the original hardware. So I do have a collection of consoles, I keep a bunch of tubs like this stashed away:



My NAS got upgraded a while back after giving me warnings about being 80% full. Funny how quickly these things fill up. It start out as 4 drives, then 8 drives, and is now 16 drives:





These stupid cases with solid front panels. It needed some speed holes, so it could actually breath, make sure the drives stayed nice and cool:



Honestly I think it looks better too:

[Aaron Coomer (3.504)]

next is liquid cooled!

[ohioyj]

next is liquid cooled!

I like my air cooling. The only time I messed with water cooling in PCs was with a AIO, and it exploded and took out most of my hardware. My dead hardware pile:



I tried letting it dry, and tried cleaning the stuff, didn't work. It particularly stunk too, as I had won the silicone lottery that time around, that was the best overclocking CPU I've ever gotten. I replaced it with basically a similar chip, just the next generation, and I couldn't get much much of an overclock out of it at all.

So now it's always air cooled. You'll noticed in the picture about of my son's PC, that's an air cooled 12900k, my PC is an air cooled 13900k: