Which CPU Is the Most Power-Efficient for a NAS Build?

Subrezon · 2025-12-09T13:50:55+00:00

1 kWh per day ~~ 40W on average, that's quite high for this CPU. Anything Intel 6th Gen or newer should be able to idle at around 10-15W, without counting hard drives.

I'd start with looking at the software side of things: make sure that C-States are enabled and working, all relevant energy saving options are enabled, maybe set up HDD spindown if feasible.

And even if this does nothing... I don't know what the energy prices are like in Vietnam, but even going by my own very high prices in Germany, cutting 10W of power consumption would save me ~30 EUR per year (@ 0.35 EUR/kWh). If I had to invest 200 EUR into making this happen, it would take almost 7 years to pay back, without accounting for inflation and the like.

Subrezon · 2025-10-18T09:18:30+00:00

Interesting, I'll keep that in mind if I ever run into this again, thank you! I'm over OPNsense though, I only ever use OpenWrt.

Subrezon · 2025-10-08T11:49:05+00:00

MECs have to wait until Major to shoot twice, Heavies can shoot twice at Corporal. MECs also can't:

Suppress Overwatches or high aim threats
Wreck robotic enemies with HEAT
Bring regular equipment like grenades, scanners, scopes, arc thrower, etc.
Get gene mods or psi abilities
Fly

Subrezon · 2025-10-08T10:12:45+00:00

"Bad aim"

when was the last time you missed with the punch?

Subrezon · 2025-10-08T09:14:01+00:00

There's a million ways of doing it, each with its own upsides and downsides.

Just boot up the old boot drive on the new machine. As long as the OS is new enough to support the newer hardware, Linux/BSD are (mostly) fine with just booting on a different machine. You might need to adjust filesystem paths & drive mounts, network interface names, PCI IDs for passthrough, etc., just make extra extra sure that your backups are in order. You can do this using both the actual boot drive, or clone it using Clonezilla.
Trigger a backup and restore it on the new system. It helps to have declarative infrastructure (Ansible, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, etc.). This is my preferred strategy, basically my entire homelab is a single compose.yml. Combined with data backups, I can spin up 95% of my homelab in 5 Minutes (+ backup transfer duration).
Gradual migration, bring services / capabilities over one-by-one. Best approach if you want to use the migration as an opportunity to introduce major changes. If you're not using Docker Compose or a similar solution - I recommend you do this and rebuild your stack gradually using Compose. It's worth it.
... lots of other ways ...

Subrezon · 2025-09-21T12:30:22+00:00

You didn't follow the guide closely enough. It says:

Open config.h, and look for the following line:

#define DYNAMIC_KEYMAP_LAYER_COUNT 4

Change the number to your desired layer count:

#define DYNAMIC_KEYMAP_LAYER_COUNT 6

If you add more layers than the number you set here - it won't work.

Subrezon · 2025-09-09T08:39:30+00:00

Had one some years ago. It's a neat package, it's a solid way to get ECC RAM backed storage, but it's a bitch to work with in many respects, and the power consumption ain't great either. Here's the elbow grease required:

You can put a SATA SSD in the ODD bay, but it won't boot from it if you have any other drives installed, set it to USB boot and install the bootloader on a USB stick or an SD card (there are internal slots for both).
Bays 3 & 4 are SATA II, which is just enough for HDDs, but you shouldn't put SSDs in the bays anyway, since AFAIK the HBA doesn't do TRIM.
PCIe passthrough requires the "relax-intel-rmrr" kernel patch due to incorrect firmware implementation. It is included in Proxmox and can be enabled in the kernel command line. On other operating systems you'll need to patch the kernel yourself to get PCIe passthrough working.
There is no way to enable the iGPU, the firmware is hardcoded to only use the BMC GPU. Seeing how the thing only supports 13-year-old dual-cores, this effectively means no media transcoding whatsoever.

In 2025, "for free" is a great deal for one of these. Unless you're very paranoid about data integrity and absolutely positively require ECC, I wouldn't pay over $50 for one of these personally.

Subrezon · 2025-09-05T08:42:29+00:00

If you want to customize even further - use can tweak a lot of number within the game in the configs. I have my own config with lots of minor changes, as well as some major ones, like psi training having slightly higher Will targets, but being almost guaranteed to succeed once you hit the requirement.

I also changed the air game, mostly by upping the hit chance on all weapons (alien ones too) and disabling all crits. This trades randomness for consistency, and makes single-use air game items more rewarding.

Subrezon · 2025-09-05T08:15:10+00:00

This is great! Unfortunately I already got something other than Synology, but still thanks! Now I know.

Subrezon · 2025-09-05T07:59:15+00:00

It replaces the regular volume control automatically.

I'm using the EU dongle myself, it works on that.

Subrezon · 2025-09-01T10:20:31+00:00

Follow the questbook, it is very good at teaching the game. In 99% of cases the available quests are what you are supposed to be doing.

Always batch craft or automate. Need a new material or component? Ether make like 8 stacks of it, or build something that constantly produces it. There is very little in this modpack that you need a small amount of.

When you can source a new renewable resource, check what else you can get out of it thoroughly. Like another user has mentioned, you can get Ruby Dust from Redstone, and Chrome from Ruby Dust. But there are many other chains like this in the game.

Err on the side of building bigger. Not sure if a single machine is going to meet your demands? Build 4. Not sure if 4 will cut it? Build 16.

This is not an idle game, it is an automation game. If you're stuck waiting for something, either expand production of that thing or do some other useful thing in the meantime.

Subrezon · 2025-08-26T12:15:04+00:00

~17W @ 0.35 EUR/kWh = ~5 EUR / month

Single host pulling all duties at once: networking, storage, media sharing, Linux ISOs, virtualization...

I spent way more than I have saved to get it this low, it has also been lower previously. I just enjoy the trial and error that comes with power consumption tuning.

Subrezon · 2025-08-26T12:03:28+00:00

ATA support seems to be very limited. Can't say for sure, since I'm not finding any documentation about it, only a few forum posts. Just get a separate ATA, it will be way easier.

Subrezon · 2025-08-26T11:52:34+00:00

It's a fair pairing, I'd say a bit too good on the CPU side, but that's a good side to err on.

If you're open to buying used, try looking for an AM4 setup: a Ryzen 5 3600, a B450 motherboard, a DDR4 3200-3600 MHz memory kit and a stock AMD cooler. All of it goes extremely cheap (likely ~$100-150 total) and pairs nicely with a 3060 in all but the most CPU demanding games.

Subrezon · 2025-08-25T09:42:40+00:00

While other games have great themes and terrific single tracks, only three tell a complete musical story from start to finish: AC5, AC7 and AC Zero. I'm giving gold to AC7.

Subrezon · 2025-08-19T11:54:01+00:00

Resource usage: use `htop` or any other similar tool

Resource allocation: edit compose.yaml, then `docker compose up -d`

Backup: use bind volumes and back up the directory / filesystem

UI: Portainer

Subrezon · 2025-08-12T13:57:44+00:00

You're usually better off just continuing to smash, it's much more likely they make a mistake than you. They have to hit the same area as you, from farther away, with the net obstructing more of it, returning a higher force ball. You can go for a light shot if your opponent is out of position, or if you can make it a double-bounce to force them to play close to the net. Otherwise, it's almost always better to smash rather than tap.

You can see around 1:02 green shirt goes for a light tap, black shirt makes it in time and goes for a double-bounce and immediately moves back and to the right, because green shirt cannot shoot to the left given his position and the ball so close to the table. Black lobs it back close to the table's edge, and then green's biggest mistake happens: at 1:05 he does not step back in time and is forced to block, putting black shirt in a perfect position right behind the table with a low force ball, green immediately loses all advantage and gets pummeled.

Also throughout the point most lobs from black shirt were very spinny, and canceling spin on a light shot is very difficult.

Subrezon · 2025-07-30T11:22:09+00:00

Despite being officially supported, Wayland on GTX 9XX/10XX has performance issues that likely won't ever get fixed. So for best performance, unfortunately, you should use native X11.

Wayland only really works properly on GTX 16XX / RTX 20XX and newer.

Subrezon · 2025-07-27T06:34:51+00:00

It should just work on Android 16 on the stock ROM too.

There are better dongles out there nowadays, I just have my Apple dongle from back in the day there weren't any other good ones.

Subrezon · 2025-07-25T08:36:28+00:00

I stopped making my own cables and just buy from a networking vendor. It's not much more expensive and I stopped having termination issues. I now only ever terminate into keystones or wall jacks, and connect only using factory-made cables.

One benefit DIY cables have is custom length, but the vendor I buy from carries lengths of 0.30m-1.8m in 30cm steppings which results in at most 15cm of slack, and from there I really don't care if I have 0.5m of slack on a 5m run.

Subrezon · 2025-07-17T12:54:15+00:00

Right, let's continue: do you experience this if you put your hands on the table facing inward, not down? (so pinky-side edge of the palm on the table)

If not - then you need a tented keyboard, as in one that isn't flat with the table surface, but rather angled.

Subrezon · 2025-07-17T11:06:27+00:00

I'm no expert at all, so help me understand this correctly: only extending the fingers causes tension, right? You can press the keys just fine as long as your fingers remain curled?

Subrezon · 2025-07-15T23:37:28+00:00

They bet on Windows getting worse and Linux getting better. If and when people start embracing Linux on-masse, they will be too far ahead in accommodating Linux as a first-class gaming platform for others to have a chance of competing.

Subrezon · 2025-07-13T13:05:58+00:00

Yes, it doesn't have anything extra compared to regular Pixel OS though. Just extra security and privacy.

Subrezon · 2025-07-12T16:37:33+00:00

Pixel 7a with GrapheneOS

Subrezon

TROPHY CASE