Honestly I think they are all weighted the same, or at least pretty damn close.

EDIT 5: Well damn, I forgot to update this with my final choice, and it's been suiting me well so far. I ended up dropping a little bit more and picked up the Bosgame P4 for roughly $285. It's been amazing so far. Running Proxmox on it with 3 VMs: HA, Jellyfin, and Pihole. All of them work great and it's been nothing but stable since I got everything running. I never knew how much a leap it was for my Pihole, it used to take 5-10 minutes to update gravity on the Pi Zero W, now it's less than 10 seconds! Jellyfin is rock solid, and I have my existing NAS SMBed to Proxmox so it can be accessed from any VM. HA is a joy as well, and I was able to restore my settings from the previous install on the Pi4. All around great choice, ad I still have headoom for a number of other VMs if needed. I've been dabbling into the *arr Suite on the Proxmox VE Helper Scripts and whileI'm not in high need of sailing too much, it's neat to have so many options at my disposal.

Thanks to all who assisted me in this setup!

EDIT 4: I almost gave up on finding the "holy grail" for my use-case. Right price, right specs, etc., and while it's not perfect, I think I found a solid balance for all. Despite most of the reviews being for a free product, they were well written enough to goad me to purchase. I ended up with the Morefine M9S N305 Mini PC. I grabbed the variant that was still 16GB DDR5, but skimped out of the m.2 size at 256 vs 512. I don't think I'll need 512GB for my application. I also went with an older but more powerful Alder Lake i3 n305 vs the flooded market of Twin Lake n150 procs. I would like to think the extra headroom and core count will prove useful with running 3+ VMs. In the meantime, I've been slowly tinkering with a VM of Proxmox (VMception?) so see how i performs. I've not gotten far with it yet :P

EDIT 3: And Amazon decided to wait until the last minute to cancel my order as it was OOS. Would've been nice if they told me sooner. The unit is now also $60 more than before. GREAT.

EDIT 2: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.

EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think I'm still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe I'll get there one of these days. I'll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)

Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I've started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it's simple). For the past couple years I've been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I've also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in ~~RAID0~~ RAID1, which is about half full atm. I'm not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I've pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.

I've looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling's article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I've continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because... it's all I know. I'd like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I'm a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I've primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I'd like to try staying with AMD as I've slowly moved over from the "dark side" (don't hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.

Last nugget is that I've never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I've new-ish to VMs too, so anything "Baby's First VM" would be nice.

I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there's no magical unicorn, I'm cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I'm really keen on seeing what options I have.

___

Really wasn't expecting to post again in this community about negative situations again, but our newest addition just left us after only two weeks. FIV absolutely fucking sucks. She was just shy of five months old.

As consolation, here's my cat tax.

Wolfgang

Riley

Phil

This was Sweets, aka Sweets Petites From the Streets Who Eats Treats, aka Sweetie. We sent her over the rainbow bridge this past Monday, as she was in a losing battle with tongue cancer. We gave her the best life we could. It feels like the world was always stacked against her, but she was a fighter. She had the voice of an elderly smoker, and she was part of our little framily.

She will be missed. We're in the process of setting up a tiny shrine for her ashes, as well as a bit of jewelry to keep her with us at all times.

EDIT 9/13/24: Forgot I never updated this. Unfortunately I ended up having the RMA the processor, which AMD promptly and smoothly replaced. I even got a spare Wraith cooler out of it :)

That said, ASRock never got back to be throughout any correspondence short of their forum moderator, who checked with the help desk but they said they couldn't find my ticket. 4 emails worth. Nary a response. Dropped ASRock going forward. I ended up with a similarly priced Gigabyte B650M board and haven't had an issue since. RAM clocked at full 6000MT/s, stability and performance on par with benchmarks, etc. Granted, I ended up spending ~$200 more than intended, but it could have all been resolved by a competent help desk team. Maybe a little bit harsh, but they had plenty of chances to find my correspondence. 2 emails and 2 tickets, with nothing to show for it. So there you have it. Bittersweet ending but at least I can play Cyberpunk 2077 with that sweet, sweet RT now.

Hey all, just recently treated myself to a new computer build after ~3 years, and I've been having nothing but trouble with USB dropouts. Had I done more research prior, I would have known about this issue that seems to have been prevalent since the AM4 days. Thing is, I've had great success with my prior build (AM4, Ryzen 7 3700x, 32GB 3600, RX 5700XT, Asrock Steel Legend mATX), so I wasn't thinking there'd be issue. Been nothing but frustration.

Specs:

• ~~Asrock PG Riptide mATX~~ Gigabyte AORUS B650M mATX mobo
• Seasonic Focus GX Gold 80+ 750W
• Ryzen 7 7700 AM5 (replaced via RMA)
• G.Skill Trident Z 32GB DDR5 6000 (Samsung chips)
• Asrock RX 7800XT 16GB
• 500GB Inland Pro NVMe (OS) - 2TB Samsung NVMe - 1TB Crucial MX500 SATA - 1TB WD Blue HDD - 4TB WD Blue HDD
• Windows 11 Pro
• Thermaltake Core v21 Case

So to start it off, the USB dropouts have been... odd. They only seem to happen from a cold boot. It starts with a simple stutter where both my KB+M (wireless 2.4GHz) start lagging and stop any input, then pick back up. Then comes the audio stutter. Slowly but surely, within about 3-5 minutes, the whole system locks up. Upon having to hit the reset button on my case (as everything seizes up), everything works as if there's no issue whatsoever. Nothing in event viewer to coincide any Windows problems. Hell, I played Starfield for ~6 hours almost non-stop yesterday with nary an issue (although Akila City decided not to load in at once point).

The other thing I find rather strange is that I could not get my RAM to reach the XMP 6000 settings, but if I set it to that and then downclock to 5600, I'm stable. Standard frequency is 4800. This issue happens even at the baseline.

I've tried BIOS upgrades and downgrades, CMOS resets, tweaking the BIOS for the "known causes" of this bug (C-states, RAM timings, etc), and yet no change. I just hope this isn't coming down to an RMA of the board or whatnot. If there's anymore info I can provide, please ask.

EDIT: I can't say for sure, but moving my regular USB 2.0 devices to the USB 3 slots seem to have resolve it. I'm still wary.

EDIT 2: I unhooked all currently unneeded USB connections (including internal front USB3.0), with only my USB hub for BT and 2.4GHz dongles and my wired Xbox controller (2 ports total). I also read that one of the "solutions: back on Am4 for this bug was to turn down PCIe speeds from Auto or 4.0/5.0 to 3.0. I'm still being cautious, but right now I did a full shutdown, power cycled the PSU, and then rebooted afterward. Running RAM at 5400MHz.

EDIT 3: Changing the PCIe speeds did not change a thing. USB seized up without any input. Upon reboot I reset defaults to the BIOS, and then, a new thing happened! Seemed to hang upon retraining of the RAM. Shut down via rear power switch, and upon this reboot, Windows refused to launch anything, even Task Manager. Multiple reboots and another BIOS default later, and I'm back to functioning (at least this boot). I'm actively shopping for a new motherboard, though choices are limited. I also can't return this mobo as it's my 2nd from Micro Center, with the first Riptide having bent pins.

Recommendations on replacements welcome. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.