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I recently bought a used set of speakers. They were slightly more than I wanted to pay ($75 CAD) but they look nice and they go well with my acrylic computer case. I have tried them out and they sound a bit tinny, although they are loud enough as they are powered. They sound fairly well on...

I am blinging up my main workstation with RGB (mostly because I'm bored with my current computer). This is a temporary setup as I intend to go watercooling but only after I upgrade the CPU/motherboard/RAM (I'm waiting to see what Ryzen3 brings to the table). I have purchased 2x Phanteks Halo...

My dual Xeon X5650 whitebox server (Supermicro X8DAi motherboard) is getting a bit long in the tooth as it runs ESXi. Due to new CPU support restrictions by VMWare I am unable to upgrade to ESXi 6.7 (I tried, didn't work despite my best efforts). This is important to me as the company I work...

I recently picked up a Thermaltake Core P7 case. I have temporarily installed an i7-3770K CPU and ASUS P8Z77-WS motherboard. It looks alright but it is definitely boring. I'd like to bling it up with some RGB fans and light strips. The problem I have is that as far as I can tell there is no...

I currently use a M1015 controller w/HP SAS expander for my FreeNAS VM in ESXi 6.5. I want to put in a hardware RAID1 controller in the ESXi host to hold the datastores. I got an old Adaptec 3405 RAID controller to do this as it is compatible with ESXi 6.5, but I just found out it has one...

Someone offered me a "real" server to replace my whitebox AMD FX-8350 running ESXi 6.5. It is a Supermicro X8DAi w/2x Xeon X5650 hex-core hyperthreading CPUs. What I am curious about is how ESXi vCPUs work - can I create a VM that uses all 24 threads as a single vCPU with 24 cores, or is ESXi...

A frenemy of mine has offered me a X8DAi motherboard w/dual Xeon X5650 CPUs and a 650W PSU, to replace my FX-8350 ESXi 6.5 hypervisor as I'm running a FreeNAS VM and I need both more RAM and ECC. Something I noticed about the rig, the motherboard has 2x 8pin sockets for power but only 1 is...

I run ESXi 6.0 at home on a FX8350 w/32GB RAM. I now run enough VMs that I ended up building a Hyper-V box from spare parts to host the Windows VMs because I kept running out of RAM (I have a FreeNAS VM in ESXi and it eats RAM like candy). I am aware of the PSOD issue on Ryzen with ESXi 6.5...

The ServerTheHome guys got ESXi 6.5 to install on a Ryzen CPU without a Pink Screen of Death: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-working-with-vmware-esxi-6-5/ Unfortunately they had to disable SMT to get it to work, which according to STH translates to a 30%+ performance loss. STH...

I am running both ESXi and Hyper-V (because I cannot get Quicksync to work in a VM, I run Emby on the Hyper-V host). In ESXi it is possible to add multiple NICs to a vSwitch so it can do a sort of link aggregation using round-robin assigments to each NIC. The VMs don't know and don't care...

I just got a Logitech Z906 5.1 speaker set and a Soundblaster Zx sound card to replace my Z-680 (the left front speaker circuit is going bad and the hiss was annoying) and the onboard Realtek audio of my computer. I had gotten the Soundblaster Zx because I figured I would need the higher...

Is it likely that the Polaris launch will be derailed like the R9 290X by crypto miners? I haven't heard much about it either way, what concerns me is that with the lower cost of the upcoming Polaris GPUs it will trigger a wave of buying that will drive up prices. This of course is highly...

I am trying to put pfSense on my home lab ESXi 5.5 hypervisor. I have experience setting up pfSense on a laptop w/1 NIC and using VLANs and a managed switch (Netgear GS716T) to make it work. The reasons I want to move pfSense to my hypervisor are: - save money on the electric bill (the...

A friend of mine who runs a music/greenscreen studio has been offered a used i7-970 system w/12GB RAM and a few other things (including a GTX 670 and a 1200W PSU) for $600 CDN (roughly $480 US). He is seriously looking at it because: 1). He's cheap. 2). He has been using a pair of i3-550's...

I recently upgraded my ESXi host to 5.5. I am running a GA-990FXA-UD5 and I noticed that after the upgrade (the online version because I know about the missing drivers) I can see certain devices available for passthrough but *NOT* available as shared resources. Specifically, my onboard...

I currently run a tri-fire HD6950 setup (actually it's is a HD6950 2GB + HD6990), Normally I'd be a bit leery about upgrading so soon, especially since I have plenty of GPU power now and it is paired with a decent CPU ([email protected]). However, I run Eyefinity 7680x1600 (3x30" monitors) and I've...

I currently use a Gigabyte UD5 motherboard paired with an AMD 8350 CPU and 32GB RAM for my ESXi 5.1 host. I have 2 VMs on it, Ubuntu Server 12.04 and Windows 7. I built a FreeNAS box using an old CPU and motherboard to experiment with, but it has become unstable (probably a bad motherboard)...

I have a client who wants to use a cloud-based storage system for his work files. He has several employees of various seniority working for him, so different folders would need different permissions. My problem is that he wants it as fully transparent as possible so that nobody has to think. He...

I'm looking to upgrade my SSDs on my main workstation. I currently run 3x60GB Samsung SSDs in RAID0, early models that don't support TRIM. This is my boot drive so I personally don't consider it the optimal setup. I use my workstation mainly for productivity software like Microsoft Office...

I've been playing with ESXi for a couple of months now, it is a great environment for anything not tied to specific hardware eg. I could not get a USB modem to work properly. What I would *LOVE* to do is have a gaming VM, probably Windows 7, with full DX11 video support and audio support...

I've been trying to source Fractal R2 140mm fans for my R2 XL case - I need 4. Problem is I can't find a retailer in Canada that has any in stock, and many online retailers worldwide are also out. Several of the online retailers actually refused to take my order as they were not sure if they...

I've been struggling with my ESXi server - not building it or installing or even updating, that's pretty straightforward (and thankfully I have been lately brushing up on my Linux so the SSH stuff was pretty easy), but with passthrough. In particular I want a sound card active in my Win7 VM...

I'm new to Type-1 hypervisors (used Type-2 for years) and I have what might sound like a stupid question: Is it possible to use the keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. on the ESXi server itself to control *ONE* VM? I just built a whitebox ESXi 5.1 server and I currently access it thru vSphere...

I'm getting ready to build a bare-metal hypervisor (need to learn Xen and ESXi) and I discovered that I don't own any CPU's that support IOMMU (that's what I get for sticking with Intel). I've been pricing a Core i7 3770 (non-K) and motherboard, they are a bit high for my taste as this is...

I am getting very poor performance on the USB 3.0 ports of my ASUS P8Z7-V LK motherboard in Windows 7 64-bit. Write speed is averaging 5mb/s on a USB 3.0 key (Kingston Datatraveler III 16GB). The same key on another computer hits over 30mb/s so it isn't the key. The write speed is the same...

Someone on Craigslist is selling an AMD HD6990 for $225. He claims he only used it for MMOs, no bitcoin mining. Normally I would reply "yeah sure" except that the overclock sticker on the card has *NOT* been touched. Would a bitcoin miner actually not overclock this card? Also, could he have...

I just bought a P8Z77-V LK motherboard and 3570K processor and I am having a rather strange problem. When highly overclocked (4.5GHz or faster), under full load using Prime95 my mouse (MX Revolution) gets very laggy - if the computer is idle the mouse works fine. At first I thought it was an...

I have a OCZ 1000W power supply in my media server, which currently has a [email protected],8GB DDR2, HD 4870 1GB, and 4 hard drives. It had 6 hard drives at one point, but I've been deleting old crap that I don't need anymore (my granddaughter hasn't watched the Barbie movies ever since she...