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10GbE at Home: The Bottleneck Is Almost Never the Network

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-07 · ~8 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Ten gigabits per second is 1.25 GB/s on the wire. A single Seagate Exos X24 is rated at 285 MB/s at its outer tracks, and that is Seagate’s own best case rather than what you will see.

That gap is the article. The fans, the cables and the cards are all real problems, and I will get to each of them, but none of them is the reason your transfers are slow.

The fan is the first thing you notice and the first thing you fix

Fan noise is what you will register in the first hour of owning a 10GbE switch, and it is what you will deal with first. There is an aftermarket in quiet replacement fans for these switches, and it exists because everyone who buys one hits the same wall in the same week.

The swap works. I do not treat it as a compromise or as a mod you put up with — a fan specified for a datacenter row is the wrong part for a shelf in a room where someone sits, and replacing it is the correct configuration for where the switch actually lives.

If you have not bought yet, there is a shorter path: buy a switch that never had a fan. MikroTik lists cooling type Passive for both the CRS305-1G-4S+IN, with four SFP+ ports, and the CRS309-1G-8S+IN, with eight. Four 10G ports covers a NAS, a workstation and a hypervisor with one spare, which is most houses.

DAC under five meters, fiber past that

Passive DAC for short runs. It is cheaper, it runs cooler, it draws less, and there are fewer parts in the path that can fail.

Cisco’s 10GBASE SFP+ datasheet puts a number on “short.” Its passive Twinax cables are listed at 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 4 and 5 meters; active Twinax starts at 7. Five meters is where the industry draws the line.

The power figures in the same document: 0.1W for a passive Twinax cable, 1W for an SFP-10G-SR module — and an optical link needs two of those modules, one at each end. Ten times the draw per port, plus two components that can fail independently of the cable between them. Inside a rack or across a room, take the DAC. Through a wall or across a house, take fiber and accept the transceivers.

The bottleneck is almost never the network

This is the part nobody says, and it is the reason most 10GbE upgrades disappoint.

Run the arithmetic against your own storage before you spend anything:

Device or interface	Ceiling	Share of a 10GbE link
10GbE link	1,250 MB/s	100%
One Exos X24 (285 MB/s rated)	285 MB/s	23%
SATA III interface (6 Gb/s, 8b/10b)	600 MB/s	48%
Four Exos striping, perfect sequential	1,140 MB/s	91%

A single hard drive gives you under a quarter of the link. A SATA SSD cannot reach half of it, and that is the interface ceiling before the flash behind it has any say. Four drives reading perfectly sequentially finally approach the wire, and nothing reads perfectly sequentially — the six-bay rebuild math covers what happens to those numbers once parity and scattered blocks are in play.

Saturating 10GbE takes NVMe or a genuinely fast array. Most people adding 10GbE do not have one.

And then there is SMB

Even with the storage to feed it, a single file copy will sit well under the link, and the protocol is why. Microsoft’s own account of the problem: with one SMB session and no Multichannel, SMB opens a single TCP connection, and that connection gets affinitized to a single CPU core. One copy, one connection, one core. A faster switch does not sell you a second core.

SMB Multichannel is the fix. On an RSS-capable NIC it opens several TCP connections for the same session and spreads them across cores. It is on by default on Windows. On TrueNAS SCALE it is a toggle under Advanced Settings in the SMB service, and flipping it costs nothing.

Check both of those before you buy hardware. “Just add 10GbE” is the most common wrong assumption in home networking, and the two things it usually fails to fix are sitting in your NAS and in your file-sharing config.

ConnectX-3 is done

The used ConnectX-3 was the budget answer for years and it is now the wrong buy at any price.

VMware’s list of devices dropped in ESXi 8.0 covers everything the nmlx4_en driver ever served, and Broadcom’s own wording is blunt: “The driver does not exist in ESXi 8.0.” Not deprecated, not degraded — absent. NVIDIA reached the same place in its own stack earlier: ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-3 Pro stopped being supported as of MLNX_OFED 5.1, with anyone who still needs the card pointed at the 4.9 long-term-support branch. NVIDIA’s current ESXi driver line begins at ConnectX-4.

One window is still open, and it is worth knowing which one. The mlx4 module remains in the mainline Linux kernel, so a card already in a Proxmox or TrueNAS box will keep coming up. Leave a working one alone. Do not buy another. My earlier budget 10GbE build put its cheapest tier on these cards, and on a Linux host that tier still runs — on ESXi 8 it does not, and I would start any new build on something newer either way.

Used enterprise NICs are still the right buy

None of the above is an argument against used enterprise silicon. It is still excellent value, and the risk was never that the hardware dies. The risk is driver and firmware support, which is exactly what ended ConnectX-3.

So invert the shopping order. Check what your hypervisor’s current release ships a driver for, then look at prices. On ESXi that puts your floor at ConnectX-4. On Linux the window is wider, but “the kernel still builds the module” is a different thing from “someone is developing it,” and the gap between those two closes in one direction only.

What to buy

Most people reading this should not buy 10GbE. Buy storage.

If your NAS is one or two spinning disks, the cable is not what is slowing you down and a switch will not change your transfer rate by a meaningful amount. The same money in an NVMe drive, or in enough spindles to read in parallel, moves the number the network cannot. Turn on SMB Multichannel while you are at it — it is free and it is the second most common cause.

If your pool already clears a gigabyte a second, the shopping order is short:

A fanless SFP+ switch. The CRS305 for four ports, the CRS309 for eight. If you buy a fanned switch anyway, budget for the replacement fan on the same order.

The CRS305 is the one I would order tonight: $265.75 for four SFP+ ports and no moving parts. The CRS309 is the same argument with eight, and Newegg does not stock it — buy that one direct or used.
Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07
Passive DAC for anything under five meters. Fiber past that, and only past that.
ConnectX-4 or newer. Used, secondhand, from whoever is cheapest — but check the driver first and the price second.

The 2.5GbE comparison is the other answer here. For a NAS on one or two spinning disks, 2.5GbE is already faster than the drives, and it costs a fraction of this. That is not a consolation prize; for most homes it is the correct stopping point.

Wrong for

Wrong if you want silence without a fan swap. Buy passive-cooled or plan the replacement into the purchase — do not buy a fanned switch and hope.

Wrong if you expect 10GbE to fix a storage problem. It will move your bottleneck from a place you can see to a place you cannot, and your copies will finish at the same time.

Wrong if the card is too old for your hypervisor. The price on a dead-driver NIC is not a bargain, it is the market telling you something.

ECC on a Home Server: What It Catches, How to Verify

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Google logged memory errors across its server fleet for two and a half years. Uncorrectable errors — the kind that take a machine down — hit 1.3% of machines per year. Correctable errors hit about a third of them. And in 70 to 80% of the uncorrectable cases, the same machine had already logged a correctable error that month or the month before.

That last number is the argument for ECC on a home server, and it is not the argument people make. ECC’s value is not that it repairs the bit. It is that it names the failing DIMM weeks early, in a counter you can read.

Which means ECC you cannot read is ECC you did not buy. Most of this page is how to prove yours is switched on.

What the two fleet studies actually found

There are two canonical field studies, and between them they cover most of what is publicly known about how real DRAM fails in real racks.

	Google fleet (2006–2008)	Facebook fleet (2013–2014)
Scale	~2.5 years, millions of DIMM days	14 months, billions of device days
Servers with a correctable error, per year	32.2%	9.62%
Uncorrectable errors	1.3% of machines per year	0.03% of servers per month
Median errors on an affected machine	25–611 per year by platform	≤9 per month
Where the errors concentrate	highly skewed by DIMM	top 1% of servers hold 97.8%

Schroeder, Pinheiro and Weber reported FIT rates of 25,000 to 70,000 per Mbit against the 200 to 5,000 that lab work had predicted, and wrote that memory errors “are not rare events.”

Meza, Wu, Kumar and Mutlu found a much lower yearly incidence seven years later. The two studies disagree by roughly 3x on how many servers see an error, and the Facebook paper says why in its own text: device generations improved over the better part of a decade, and its 9.62% figure lines up with the 5.48% to 9.10% another recent study had measured. The older number describes DDR1 and DDR2 era hardware; the newer one describes DDR3.

They also part company on error character. Google reported strong evidence that errors are dominated by hard errors — repeatable physical defects — while noting its collection could not distinguish hard from soft directly. Facebook, after separately accounting for memory controller and channel failures, found that one-off spurious failures showed up on the largest share of affected servers, 56.03%. These are different measurements of different things, and the practical conclusion survives both: some fraction of your DIMMs will start throwing errors, and the machines that do it are wildly unrepresentative of the fleet.

That skew is the part that matters at home. You do not own a fleet. You own two to four DIMMs. On the Facebook numbers the median affected server logged nine correctable errors a month while the mean was 497 — the average is 55 times the middle, because a handful of machines were on fire. You are either fine or you are the fire, and without ECC there is no way to know which.

What ECC is protecting, and what it is not

Side-band ECC — the real thing, the kind in server RAM — stores check bits in an extra DRAM chip and widens the memory bus to carry them. The memory controller generates the code on write and verifies it on read. The common scheme is SECDED: correct any single-bit error, detect any double-bit error. That is a whole-path guarantee from the controller through the connector to the cells and back.

Uncorrectable errors are the failure this prevents. In Google’s environment a single uncorrectable error was treated as serious enough to shut the machine down and replace the DIMM. On your NAS the same event is a kernel panic mid-scrub, or a silent bad byte written into a snapshot you will keep for three years.

But the correction is the smaller half of what you are buying. The bigger half is the log line.

DDR5 on-die ECC is not ECC, and the listings will not tell you

Every DDR5 chip has on-die ECC. It is a manufacturing yield measure, not a reliability feature you own, and PassMark’s MemTest86 documentation is blunt about the limits: on-die ECC “does not provide end-to-end protection,” it “does not detect or prevent errors that occur during transmission between the memory controller and the memory module,” and it “is completely invisible to the CPU and memory controller,” providing no feedback to the rest of the system.

Read that last clause again against the reason you wanted ECC. On-die ECC can never tell you a DIMM is degrading, because it never tells the operating system anything at all.

Retailers put the phrase in titles anyway. A live Newegg listing for a Kingston FURY Beast 32GB DDR5-5600 gaming module — a black-heatspreader desktop stick — describes itself in its own title as “On-die ECC Unbuffered 288Pin UDIMM Standard Desktop Computer Memory.” It is not ECC memory. It will never populate an EDAC counter. It carried $709.99 in the August 17 feed, which is server-memory money for a gaming stick.

So buy by part number, not by keyword. Real ECC UDIMMs are sold under server part numbers — Kingston KSM, Micron MTC with an EC in the code, Samsung M324R — and those are the strings that appear on a motherboard’s memory QVL. The word ECC in a product title, on its own, tells you nothing at all.

What has to be true before any of this works

Four things, and all four are decided before you power on. If you are still choosing the platform, the Proxmox hardware requirements guide covers the rest of the spec around this decision.

The CPU. AMD’s own product page for the Ryzen 9 9950X lists ECC Support as “Yes (Requires mobo support).” That parenthetical is doing all the work. AMD ships the memory controller capability across the desktop line and then hands responsibility for enabling it to whoever made your board. Intel splits it by platform instead: ECC on Core processors needs a workstation chipset, which is why Supermicro’s X13SAE-F pairs W680 with 12th–14th Gen Core and lists “192GB Unbuffered ECC/non-ECC UDIMM.”

The board. This is where consumer boards fail you quietly. A spec line reading “supports DDR5 ECC/non-ECC UDIMM” tells you the slot accepts the module. It does not tell you the firmware turns correction on. Server boards publish a memory QVL naming exact ECC part numbers; ASRock Rack puts one behind the Memory QVL tab on the B650D4U’s product page, and that list, not the spec bullet, is what to buy from. A named part on a published list is a commitment. “ECC compatible” in a marketing bullet is not.

The RAM. Unbuffered ECC (ECC UDIMM) for these platforms, not registered (RDIMM), which needs a server socket. In the August 17 Newegg feed the cheapest genuine 32GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM row sits at $849.99 against $499.00 for the cheapest non-ECC 32GB module — roughly $350 a stick. Both numbers are inflated by the 2026 DRAM crunch and both are dated. The gap is the shape of the decision.

The firmware setting. MemTest86 documents the option names you are looking for: DRAM ECC Enable on AMI, ASUS, ASRock and MSI firmware, or ECC Mode on some ASUS boards.

Then verify: four independent things have to line up, and nothing on the POST screen confirms they did.

Verify it: four commands

1. Ask the firmware what it thinks

sudo dmidecode -t 16

Physical Memory Array
Location: System Board Or Motherboard
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 128 GB
Number Of Devices: 4

Error Correction Type is dmidecode printing the SMBIOS Type 16 field. DSP0134 v3.7.0 defines exactly seven values for it: Other, Unknown, None, Parity, Single-bit ECC, Multi-bit ECC, CRC. None is a clear negative. Anything with ECC in it is a claim.

Then check the modules themselves:

sudo dmidecode -t 17 | grep -E 'Locator:|Total Width|Data Width|Size:'

 Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 32 GB
Locator: DIMM A1

The SMBIOS spec defines Total Width as the width “including any check or error-correction bits,” and says that “if there are no error-correction bits, this value should be equal to Data Width.” Equal widths mean the module carries no check bits. Wider than the data width means it does — 72 against 64 on an ECC UDIMM, wider still on a registered module. This is the one dmidecode check that describes physical hardware rather than a firmware opinion.

And that is the limit of what dmidecode is worth. Its own manual page ends with a BUGS section that reads, in full: “More often than not, information contained in the DMI tables is inaccurate, incomplete or simply wrong.” The firmware can advertise Multi-bit ECC on a board that never enabled it. Treat this step as a screen, not a verdict.

2. Ask the memory controller

grep -H . /sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc*/dimm*/dimm_edac_mode

/sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc0/dimm0/dimm_edac_mode:SECDED
/sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc0/dimm2/dimm_edac_mode:SECDED

This is the check that settles it. EDAC is the kernel’s Error Detection And Correction subsystem, and dimm_edac_mode reports, in the ABI documentation’s words, “what type of Error detection and correction is being utilized.” The kernel picks from a fixed string table in edac_mc_sysfs.c: Unknown, None, Reserved, PARITY, EC, SECDED, S2ECD2ED, S4ECD4ED, S8ECD8ED, S16ECD16ED.

SECDED or an S*ECD*ED chipkill mode: correction is running. You are done.
None: the controller is not doing ECC, whatever the DIMMs are.
Nothing printed, or /sys/devices/system/edac/mc/ empty: no EDAC driver bound. Load the one for your platform — amd64_edac for AMD, ie31200_edac or igen6_edac for Intel client parts, skx_edac or i10nm_edac for Xeon Scalable. An empty directory is a missing driver, not a verdict on your hardware.

3. Read the counters, and record the baseline

grep -H . /sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc*/{ce_count,ue_count,ce_noinfo_count,ue_noinfo_count}
grep -H . /sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc*/dimm*/dimm_{label,ce_count,ue_count}

The ABI’s note on ce_count is the operational instruction: “This count is very important to examine. CEs provide early indications that a DIMM is beginning to fail. This count field should be monitored for non-zero values.” ce_noinfo_count carries corrected errors the controller could not attribute to a slot — the docs describe that state as memory being “handicapped, but operational” — and it needs watching too.

Write down what these read on a healthy boot. A number means nothing until you know what it was yesterday.

4. Make something watch it

Counters nobody reads are decoration. rasdaemon is the current tool; mcelog and edac-utils are both deprecated.

sudo apt install rasdaemon
sudo systemctl enable --now rasdaemon
sudo ras-mc-ctl --error-count
sudo ras-mc-ctl --summary

Label CE UE
mc#0csrow#2channel#0 0 0
mc#0csrow#2channel#1 0 0

On Windows, corrected hardware errors land in the Event Log as WHEA-Logger warnings, and per MemTest86, if ECC is properly enabled in firmware you get them without configuring anything.

Point your existing monitoring at the CE count and alert on any increase. The site’s monitoring comparison covers what to run; any of them can watch a file.

Two ways a working system looks broken

Zeros everywhere on an AMD board. MemTest86 names the culprit: a firmware option called Platform First Error Handling (PFEH). When it is enabled, the platform swallows the errors and the operating system never sees them. Set it to disabled. On boards with a BMC, out-of-band management can intercept reporting the same way, which is worth knowing before you conclude a Supermicro is broken.

A steady drip of correctable errors on healthy RAM. ECC memory has to be written before it can be read, and firmware normally does that at POST. Boards with Quick Boot enabled skip it, and EDAC then reports corrections on memory that was simply never initialised. Disable Quick Boot; boot takes 30 to 60 seconds longer and the phantom errors stop.

What to do when the counter moves

A single correctable error is not an emergency. The distribution says most machines that log one log a handful and carry on.

Escalation is what matters. Google’s data showed a DIMM that has seen a correctable error is 13 to 228 times more likely to see another that same month, and 70 to 80% of uncorrectable errors were preceded by a correctable one in the same or previous month. Facebook flagged a server for repair above 100 correctable errors per week, and its authors calculated that the policy could lower uncorrectable error rate by up to 2.8x compared with waiting for the first uncorrectable event.

Copy the 100-per-week threshold. It is Facebook’s actual repair rule and it is easy to alert on. Google’s paper is clear about what it costs: the absolute probability of an uncorrectable error following a correctable one runs 0.1% to 2.3% per month, so most modules pulled on that rule would have been fine, and its authors said the swap only pays where downtime is expensive enough to cover the false positives. At fleet scale that is an economics question. At home, replacing one $850 stick a decade is not the expensive outcome. Losing the pool is.

And note what the counter does not protect. ECC catches bits. It does not catch you deleting the wrong dataset. The 3-2-1 rule is a separate obligation and ECC does not reduce it by one copy.

Buy the ASRock Rack B650D4U

$299.00 for the board, then a pair of ECC UDIMMs off its published QVL, then verify with EDAC before you put data on it.

Micro-ATX, AM5, four DIMM slots supporting DDR5 ECC/non-ECC UDIMM, and IPMI on board. That last item is why it wins over an ASUS or ASRock consumer board that also lists ECC in its memory line: the same $299 buys documented ECC and out-of-band management, so when the machine stops posting you can read the console instead of carrying a monitor to it. Newegg lists it at $299 today, down from $359; the August 17 feed had it at $323.19. Two readings three weeks apart, and both in that band.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

On Intel, buy the Supermicro X13SAE-F instead. W680 chipset, 12th through 14th Gen Core, 192GB of unbuffered ECC or non-ECC UDIMM, BMC included. Same logic, different socket. It is the right answer if you already own the CPU.

Do not pay the ECC premium on a consumer board. A board that lists ECC in its memory spec and publishes no ECC QVL is selling you slot compatibility. You can spend $350 a stick and still read None back out of dimm_edac_mode, and the only thing you bought was a slower boot.

Do not buy a used rack server for cheap ECC. Used rack servers are on my regret list — cheap to buy, expensive to run, far louder than the listings suggest, and “quiet” in that market means quiet for a datacenter. Replacing rack gear with small nodes is the best change I have made to the setup. The used enterprise versus mini PC comparison runs that math properly.

And accept the trade if you are buying small. The MS-01 is the mini PC I would buy for a node, and it is the wrong machine for anyone who needs ECC and IPMI. That is not a flaw in the MS-01. It is the thing you give up for four NICs in that volume, and it is worth giving up for a hypervisor node whose state lives somewhere else. It is not worth giving up for the box that holds the array. The MS-01 review covers what it is good at.

ECC is a decision you make once, at motherboard-and-CPU time, and cannot revisit later. Make it deliberately, then spend ninety seconds proving it took.

Homelab Regrets: Five Purchases I'd Take Back

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The used rack server is the purchase I would undo first. Cheap to buy, expensive to run, and far louder than the listings suggest — “quiet” in that market means quiet for a datacenter.

Every regret below has that shape. The purchase price was the number that looked good, and the cost that mattered turned up somewhere else: in what the box draws around the clock, in the noise floor, in a chassis outgrown almost immediately.

Five purchases I would take back, worst first.

1. Used rack servers — the one I would undo first

The noise part is measurable, and Dell publishes the measurements. Its 13G PowerEdge acoustical document covers the 13G line — the R630, R730 and R730xd among them, the generation that fills used listings — and it reports per configuration rather than per model, which turns out to be the whole story:

Dell 13G configuration	Idle	Operating
R730, minimum: 1 CPU, 1× 4GB DIMM, 1 SSD, no PCI cards	4.7 bels / 28 dBA	5.3 bels / 33 dBA
R730, typical 2.5": 2 CPUs, 8 DIMMs, 8× 10K SAS	4.7 bels / 28 dBA	5.8 bels / 39 dBA
R630, feature-rich: 2× 135W CPUs, 16 DIMMs, 8× 15K SAS	6.4 bels / 43 dBA	6.4 bels / 43 dBA

Sound power is the upper-limit LwA per ISO 9296; the dBA figure is bystander sound pressure, taken in a 24U rack at 23°C per ISO 7779.

Two things fall out of that table. The minimum configuration is one processor, one 4GB stick, one SSD and no expansion cards, and nobody sells that machine used. And the feature-rich R630 prints the same number for idle and operating — 6.4 bels either way. It does not quieten down, because there is nothing to quieten down to.

The dependency notes in the same document are where the buying advice actually lives:

Low-power Xeons make it louder. Dell states that configurations with 65W L-series parts such as the E5-2650L v3 run “about twice as loud as typical configurations” under moderate or heavy use. Those are the exact chips people buy to cut the power bill.
A GPU doubles it again. Any GPGPU card in an R730 is “about twice as loud” as the typical build.
Drive count raises the floor. An R730xd 3.5-inch chassis with 16 drives idles about 50% louder than one with four — 6.2 bels against 5.6.
PCIe SSDs raise the ceiling. Under highly stressed conditions the R730 goes to 7.0 bels.

Dell’s own reference table settles what “quiet” means to the people who designed these. It maps 75 dBA and 39 sones to “Data center, vacuum cleaner, voice must be elevated to be heard,” and 45 dBA and 4 sones to “Whispering, open office layout, normal living room.” A machine engineered to be acceptable in the first room is not being engineered for your second bedroom.

The running cost points the same direction. The idle power costs page puts a single-CPU Dell R720 at 80–100W against 15–22W for a current mini PC, on the lightly-threaded workloads most homelabs actually run. What the rack server still wins on is RAM capacity, drive bays and expansion slots — not compute per watt.

Replacing the rack gear with small nodes is the best change I have made to the setup. If you are still weighing it, used enterprise versus mini PC puts the two side by side, and servers for a homelab covers the classes in between.

2. Over-building generally

I spec’d for a workload that never showed up.

Every watt of headroom you buy ahead of the work is a watt you pay for twenty-four hours a day while the work fails to arrive, and the hardware depreciates the entire time it waits. The power cost calculator will price the headroom you are considering before you commit to it.

Buy for the workload you are running this quarter. The homelab that grows into more capacity is a cheaper machine than the one that was already sitting there.

3. Two-bay NAS units

Two bays get outgrown almost immediately. Four bays or build.

The arithmetic is the whole argument. Two bays mirrored leave you one drive of usable capacity, and the only way to grow is to replace both drives and rebuild the pool. Four bays under single parity give you three drives of capacity and let you swap disks one at a time as they fail or as prices fall. The NAS capacity calculator shows the gap at whatever drive size you are shopping.

Start at four bays or build your own. What you save on the two-bay enclosure you spend again on the replacement, plus a migration you did not plan for.

4. Cheap 2.5GbE switches

They are a coin flip on thermals.

The warranty is the filter I would use now, because it is the one line in a listing that costs the manufacturer something to write. TP-Link’s US warranty schedule gives switches with a plastic chassis two years, non-Omada switches with a steel chassis three, and reserves limited lifetime cover for the Omada S4500, S5500, S6500 and S7500 series. TRENDnet publishes a lifetime warranty on the TEG-S350, its 5-port unmanaged 2.5G box.

If the switch in front of you offers a single year, you have left the tier that stands behind these. Buy from a brand whose warranty terms you can find without emailing anyone.

5. Exos bought on price and capacity

I bought Exos on price and capacity, then regretted them for noise.

The published acoustics say where the gap actually is. Here are three 24TB enterprise drives, sound power in bels, each from its manufacturer’s own document:

24TB drive	Idle	Seek / operating
Seagate Exos X24 (ST24000NM002H)	2.8 typical / 3.0 max	3.2 typical / 3.4 max
WD Ultrastar DC HC580	2.0 typical / 2.5 max	3.2 typical / 3.4 max
Toshiba MG11 (MG11ACA24T)	2.0 typical	3.2 typical

Under seek all three print the same figure. The entire published gap sits at idle — 0.8 bels, eight decibels of sound power — and idle is where a NAS spends its life. The drives are not working during most of the hours you can hear them, which is why the seek number is the wrong one to shop on and the idle number is the right one. The gap also does not go away when there are six of them in one box. One caveat from Seagate’s own footnote: offline SMART activity during idle “may increase acoustic and power to operational levels,” so the idle figure is a floor rather than a promise.

None of that makes the Exos a bad drive. It is the cheapest 24TB drive in its class by enough to matter across six bays — the six-bay rebuild math priced it at $39.50/TB against $44.17 for the WD Red Pro in August 2026. If the array lives in a basement or a garage, buy on price and buy the Exos. If it shares a room with you, shop the published idle figure and pay for the Ultrastar or the MG.

What I would buy instead

Small nodes, not a rack. This is the change that improved the setup most.
Four bays minimum, or build the box yourself.
The workload you have, not the one you are planning for.
A switch with a warranty you can read, over the cheapest 2.5GbE port count.
Idle acoustics over price on drives, but only when the array is in earshot.

Each of these looked good on one number. The rack server was cheap. The switch was cheap. The Exos are still the cheapest per terabyte. The number that decided the outcome was always the second one.

How to Test a UPS: Charge Is Not Health

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The number on the front of a UPS is a charge reading. It is not a health reading.

A unit showing full can drop the load the moment it transfers. The display will have been telling you everything was fine right up until the instant it stopped being fine, and it was not lying — it was answering a different question than the one you thought you were asking.

That gap between charged and working is the whole subject here. Sizing the unit is settled territory: VA against watts, runtime against your shutdown window. This is about what comes after you have bought the right size — proving it does the job, on a schedule, before the power goes out and proves it for you.

The built-in self-test is not a runtime test

Most units test themselves. The test covers less than the name suggests.

Schneider’s documentation for the Smart-UPS line says the unit self-tests when you switch it on and every two weeks after that, and that during the test it runs on battery for approximately ten seconds (Schneider Electric FA405317). The Back-UPS line runs the same ten seconds on a different clock — Schneider describes the automatic test as happening every seven days after the unit is powered on — and its replace-battery alarm is framed against a standard two-minute runtime limit (Schneider Electric FAQ000267818).

Ten seconds is a genuinely useful test of one thing: the transfer relay closes and the inverter comes up. Keep it enabled. But read what it is measuring. A battery that has lost most of its useful capacity will hold ten seconds without complaint, and it will hold two minutes for a while after that. By the time the automatic test starts failing, you have already been running on a battery that would not have finished a shutdown.

Charge is a percentage. Capacity is minutes. The panel shows you the first one and you need the second one.

An untested UPS is a surge protector with a battery in it

So test on a schedule, and make it a real test.

Connect the load the unit actually protects. Pull the input cord. Watch what the load does at the moment of transfer, and time how long the battery holds before the shutdown you configured actually fires. That one pull exercises the transfer, the inverter, the battery under its real load, and your shutdown chain, in the order they will happen for real.

Nothing else does. A ten-second self-test skips the load. A runtime figure from a spec sheet skips your gear. The UPS runtime calculator will model the curve for you, and the model is worth having as a starting expectation — but a modelled forty minutes and a measured forty minutes are not the same claim, and only one of them is about the battery currently sitting in your rack.

If you would rather not pull a cord on live equipment, NUT will start a deep battery test on hardware that exposes one:

upscmd -u <user> <upsname> test.battery.start.deep

test.battery.start.quick, test.battery.start.deep and test.battery.stop are all standard NUT instant commands (NUT instant command reference), and upscmd -l <upsname> lists what your specific unit supports (upscmd man page).

There is a second reason to test that has nothing to do with the battery. A UPS can fail in a way that takes the load down with it. That is a real failure mode, not a freak event. The box you bought to prevent an unclean shutdown sits in series with everything it protects, and the only way to find out how yours behaves when it goes wrong is to make it transfer while you are standing there rather than at 3am while you are not.

Pure sine, or don’t put a server PSU behind it

This one has a mechanism, and the mechanism is published by the people selling the cheaper option.

CyberPower’s explanation of its own PFC Sinewave line is that a simulated sine wave produces a zero-output state during the phase change — a gap in the waveform — and that this gap can interrupt equipment running an active-PFC power supply when the unit switches from mains to battery (CyberPower, PFC Sinewave Series).

Read where that failure lands. Not during a brownout, not on a slow degrade — at transfer. The single event the UPS exists to handle is the event a simulated-sine unit is worst at, and active PFC is standard in modern PC and server supplies; CyberPower’s own page dates that transition to the last fifteen years.

Simulated sine into an active-PFC supply is asking for trouble on transfer. Pure sine for anything with a server PSU behind it.

USB and NUT, not a network management card

Network management cards cost absurd money next to the UPS they plug into. A UPS network management card is a separate accessory bought on top of the unit, and for a single-site homelab it buys network-side monitoring you can get from a cable.

USB plus NUT does the job and is what I’d run. Three pieces:

usbhid-ups should detect anything implementing the HID Power Device Class, with the amount of data varying by manufacturer and model. NUT lists all MGE, Dell and AMETEK Powervar USB models, the newer Eaton USB models, and specific models from APC, CyberPower, TrippLite, Belkin, Powercom and PowerWalker (usbhid-ups man page). Check your exact model against the compatibility list before you count on it.
upsmon watches for the critical condition — on battery, low charge — sets the forced-shutdown flag, and lets every machine it is monitoring run its own shutdown command with a delay you set (NUT configuration notes).
upscmd gives you the battery tests above and the alarm control below.

That is the entire feature set most homelabs wanted from the card.

If it can’t trigger a clean shutdown of what’s plugged into it, most of the value is gone. A UPS that only buys you a few minutes of uptime during which nobody is home to act is a very expensive way to delay the same unclean power-off. The shutdown chain is the product. Configure it the day the unit arrives, then test that it fires — which is the same plug-pull from two sections up, and the reason that test is worth doing properly.

The alarm will go off at 3am

It will. The alarm is standard equipment, and the first time it fires is the worst possible moment to be learning where the mute button is.

Decide now what you want it to do, and set it now. NUT exposes beeper.disable, beeper.mute, beeper.enable and beeper.toggle as instant commands (same reference), so this is one upscmd call, done while you are awake and thinking clearly about whether you actually want an audible alarm in that room.

Batteries are a consumable

Plan for the replacement rather than being surprised by it. Sealed lead-acid cells are on a several-year cycle, and third-party replacements are standard practice — not a corner cut.

Schneider puts most APC batteries at three to five years and notes that every 8°C (15°F) of extra operating temperature halves that life (Schneider Electric FA158934). That second figure is the one people miss. A UPS in a warm closet is not on the same schedule as the same UPS in a basement, and if you have put yours in the warm closet, the replacement year on your calendar is optimistic.

Which puts you back at the test. The only way to know where your battery is on that curve is to have measured it recently under load.

What I’d do: pure sine, USB, NUT, and a plug-pull on a schedule

Buy a pure sine wave unit sized to your load, connect it over USB, run NUT, and pull the plug on a schedule. No management card. That configuration covers the transfer, the shutdown, the alarm and the tests, and there is nothing left in the card that a homelab with one rack needs.

The plug-pull is the part people skip and the only part that produces information. Put it on a recurring reminder alongside whatever else you check, keep the number you measured, and compare it to the last one. When the measured runtime has fallen far enough that your shutdown no longer finishes inside it, buy cells — before the automatic self-test gets around to agreeing with you.

This is wrong for a few situations. Simulated sine into active PFC — do not, at any price. A consumer unit under a full rack, where the load is past what the unit is rated to hold and the runtime is theatre. And anyone who will not set up automatic shutdown, because at that point the money bought a surge protector with a battery in it, which is where this started.

Testing does not make a UPS more reliable. It tells you whether the one you own is still doing the job, which is a different and more useful thing than a green light. And none of it replaces keeping backups somewhere else — a clean shutdown protects the pool, not the data.

Living With Exos: Noise, Vibration, and Recerts

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Exos are loud. Not louder-than-a-laptop loud — loud enough that where the array lives is a decision you make before you buy the drives, not after they arrive.

I bought mine on price and capacity. The noise is the part I regret.

But the drive is not what you hear. The chassis panel resonating with the drive is what you hear, and that changes what you should do about it.

The three brands are identical under seek

All three manufacturers publish sound power in their own product manuals, each measured to ISO 7779:

24TB drive	Idle (typ)	Seek (typ)
Seagate Exos X24	2.8 bels	3.2 bels
WD Ultrastar DC HC580	2.0 bels	3.2 bels
Toshiba MG11	2.0 bels	3.2 bels

Figures from the Seagate Exos X24 SATA product manual (Rev. C, Table 9), the Ultrastar DC HC580 SATA specification (Rev. 2.1, Table 21) and the Toshiba MG11 product overview, which prints sound power as 20 dB idle and 32 dB seek — the same 2.0 and 3.2 bels in different units.

Read that table again, because it is not the shape people expect. Under seek there is no difference at all. Every one of these is a 7200 RPM enterprise drive, and every one of them is 3.2 bels when the heads are moving. Seagate and Western Digital both publish the same 3.4 bel maximum on top of it.

The whole gap is idle. Eight decibels of sound power, on a machine that spends the overwhelming majority of its life idle. That is why HGST’s Ultrastar line — Western Digital’s since the acquisition — and Toshiba’s MG carry the quiet reputation, and it is a narrower, more specific advantage than the reputation suggests.

You pay for it. In my August 17 pricing the Toshiba MG at 24TB ran $43.12 per terabyte against $39.50 for the Exos — about 9% more, which is $87 a drive and $522 across six bays.

I can’t tell you idle draw per drive from memory and I’m not going to guess — it’s the number everyone asks for on deal threads and nobody answers.

The panel is the noise

Vibration is the part people miss when they shop this by spec sheet.

Seagate rates the Exos X24 to hold greater than 90% throughput on sequential and random writes while being shaken at 12.5 rad/s² of rotary vibration between 20 and 1500 Hz, and to run without unrecoverable errors under 0.70 Grms of linear vibration from 5 to 500 Hz. The drive is engineered to keep working while it shakes.

Nothing in that specification says your enclosure stays quiet while it happens. The energy goes somewhere. In a thin steel side panel it goes into a large flat surface with a resonant frequency, and a 7200 RPM spindle is very good at finding it. That is the sound you are actually annoyed by — not the drive, the sheet metal the drive is bolted to.

Which means isolation fixes more than shopping for a quieter model does. Grommets or rubber-isolated sleds in the bays, a heavier or braced enclosure, and drives that are not rigidly coupled to one big panel. The 0.8 bel difference between an Exos and an Ultrastar is real, and it is smaller than the difference between a bare metal cage and an isolated one.

The manual is specific about the mounting itself, and it is worth following: 6-32 UNC screws only, inserted no more than 3.56 mm into the side or bottom holes, at a maximum torque of 6 in-lb. Cranking a drive down hard into a panel does not stop the noise. It couples the two more tightly.

The number on the box is the outer edge of the platter

Sequential throughput comes in under spec. Not by a lot, and not in a way that matters for a NAS, but the number printed on the listing is not the number you get.

That is by design rather than by disappointment. Seagate’s 285 MB/s is the maximum sustained rate at the outer diameter — the manual prints it as 272 MiB/s OD. Outer tracks are physically longer, so more sectors pass under the head per rotation. Fill the pool and you are working further in, at a lower rate, with nothing wrong anywhere.

If you are sizing a rebuild window, that is the direction the error runs: slower than the floor, never faster.

How to buy recertified

Recertified is a normal way to buy drives now, not a corner cut. Seagate runs the program itself and describes the process as sanitize, test against factory performance standards, then certify.

Test every recert on arrival, before it joins anything. A full SMART extended self-test:

smartctl -t long /dev/sdX # start it
smartctl -c /dev/sdX # the drive reports its own expected polling time
smartctl -a /dev/sdX # read the result when it finishes

The smartctl documentation puts the extended test at “tens of minutes to several hours.” At 24TB you are at the long end of that. Start it before bed. If a drive is going to fail early, it fails there — outside your array, while you still have a return window.

The warranty is the real tradeoff, and it is not one number

This is where recertified actually costs you, and the spread is wider than most people expect. Same drive family, four different answers, all live today:

Where you buy it	Stated warranty
New Exos X24, from Seagate	5-year limited warranty
Seagate’s own recertified program	6 months
Recertified Exos X24 at Newegg (ST24000NM000C)	90 days
Recertified Exos X24 at ServerPartDeals (ST24000NM000H)	3 years

Sources: Seagate’s Exos X24 support page and recertified drives page, the Newegg recertified listing, and the ServerPartDeals listing.

The mechanism behind the spread is the thing to understand. ServerPartDeals defines a manufacturer-recertified drive as one “tested, recertified, and approved by the original manufacturer… without a manufacturer warranty.” The original coverage does not travel with the drive. What you get instead is whatever the seller chose to promise, and on the same 24TB Exos that runs from 90 days to three years.

So the rule is not “recert has a shorter warranty.” It is read the listing you are actually buying from, because the number is set there and nowhere else. Three years of seller coverage on a recert is a different purchase from ninety days at a similar price.

“It already broke once” misses how parity works

The standard objection to recertified drives is that they are drives that already failed. It misunderstands what the array is for.

A redundant array does not assume its members are healthy. It assumes they will die and holds enough parity to survive it while a replacement copies. Recert plus redundancy plus backups is the whole argument — and if you are missing the third one, the first two do not save you. Parity survives a drive dying. It does not survive a deleted directory, or the enclosure’s power supply taking the shelf with it.

That is the actual condition on buying recertified. Not “is this drive suspicious,” but “do I have all three.” If you only have two, buying new drives leaves you in the same place, just more expensively.

Check for SMR anyway

SMR is a consumer-drive problem. Western Digital’s own SMR disclosure is titled “WD Internal Client HDD Recording Technology” and lists WD Red 3.5-inch at 2/3/4/6TB plus some WD Blue and WD Black models — client drives, none above 6TB — with the note that “all other capacity points use CMR recording technology.”

The three enterprise families here are all CMR, confirmed in their own documentation: Seagate describes the 24TB Exos X24 as “conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based,” Western Digital’s HC580 manual labels its 22/24TB power table the “CMR Model,” and Toshiba’s MG11 overview opens by calling it a “conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDD.”

Check the model number anyway. It costs thirty seconds, and SMR discovered during a resilver is the worst afternoon you will have.

Buy the Exos, and decide where it goes before you order

For a homelab array, buy the Seagate Exos. It costs less per terabyte than the Toshiba, it is identical to both of the others under seek, and the idle penalty is a room problem you solve with rubber and a closed door rather than with $522 of extra drives. Buy recertified if the listing’s warranty is one you would accept in writing, and run the long test the day it lands.

Search NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Prices move. Check before you buy six.

Buy the Ultrastar HC580 or the Toshiba MG11 instead if the array has to sit in a room you occupy quietly — a home office you take calls in, a studio apartment, a living room. On the Toshiba you are buying 0.8 bels at idle for about 9% more per terabyte, and in that room it is worth it.

Do not put any of these in a room you sleep in. Not the Exos, not the quiet ones. Move the array or accept that you will hear it, because 2.0 bels at idle is still an enterprise drive four feet from your head, and it goes to 3.2 the moment a scrub starts at 2am.

Who should not buy these

Anyone putting the array in a bedroom. The quieter models narrow the gap at idle and close nothing under load.
Anyone trusting a single recert with unbacked data. Recert works because parity and a backup sit behind it. Alone it is a used drive.
Anyone who wants one quiet external drive. These are 7200 RPM enterprise disks built for a chassis full of their siblings. Buy a consumer drive for that job.

The Seagate drive comparison covers where Exos sits against IronWolf and IronWolf Pro, and the capacity calculator runs the parity maths for whatever bay count you land on.

Local 70B: What It Costs in Hardware and Watts

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-07 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

A dense 70B is the model everyone means when they say they want to run a real LLM at home. Here is what it actually does once it is loaded: 12.6 tokens per second.

That is Hardware Corner’s March 2026 measurement of Llama 3.3 70B at Q4 on an RTX A6000, the cheapest 48GB card that holds the file. A thousand-token answer takes 79 seconds. Push the context to 16K and the same card gives 9.1 tokens per second, which is 110 seconds for the same answer.

At that rate the electricity tops out at $1.21 per million tokens. The card costs $5,490.00 new. Watts are not what makes a local 70B expensive. Capital and patience are.

42.52 gigabytes decides which cards are even in the conversation

The Llama 3.3 70B Q4_K_M GGUF is 42,520,398,816 bytes — 42.52GB of weights before the KV cache and runtime buffers exist. Hugging Face’s repository API reports that byte count directly, and the whole quantization ladder with it:

Quant	File size	Fits 24GB	Fits 32GB	Fits 48GB
IQ2_S	22.24GB	Weights only	Yes	Yes
IQ2_M	24.12GB	No	Yes	Yes
Q3_K_S	30.91GB	No	Weights only	Yes
Q3_K_M	34.27GB	No	No	Yes
Q4_K_M	42.52GB	No	No	Yes, 5.48GB spare
Q4_K_L	43.30GB	No	No	Yes, 4.70GB spare
Q5_K_S	48.66GB	No	No	No

Exact sizes from the bartowski GGUF repository file listing.

Read the columns rather than the rows. A 24GB card gets you IQ2_S with 1.8GB left over for everything else — a 70B in name only. A 32GB card gets you Q3_K_S with about a gigabyte of headroom, which is why an RTX 5090 does not solve this problem despite costing what it costs. 48GB is the first tier where the file loads at a quantization worth using and leaves room to work. That is the line, and it does not move because you want it to.

If you are choosing between the specific cards that sit either side of it, the RTX A6000 versus RTX 5090 comparison is the card-by-card version of that decision. This page is about what the whole tier costs once you are in it.

What 48GB actually delivers on a 70B

Hardware Corner runs its GPU benchmarks on Ubuntu 24.04 with llama.cpp’s llama-bench and CUDA 12.8 at 4-bit quantization, and publishes the per-card tables. These are its Llama 3.3 70B rows:

Card	Memory	Max power	Decode 4K	Decode 16K	Prefill 4K
RTX A6000	48GB GDDR6	300W	12.6 t/s	9.1 t/s	423.0 t/s
RTX 6000 Ada	48GB GDDR6	300W	18.1 t/s	13.7 t/s	678.1 t/s
RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell	48GB or 72GB GDDR7	300W	24.0 t/s	22.4 t/s	1,022.9 t/s

Decode and prefill figures come from Hardware Corner’s per-card pages, one page per row: RTX A6000, RTX 6000 Ada and RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell. Methodology is on its GPU ranking page, which states the 4-bit runs use Q4_K_XL rather than the Q4_K_M file sized in the table above; the two are close enough that both need 48GB and far enough apart that these rates are not a measurement of that exact file. Memory and maximum power from NVIDIA’s professional desktop GPU specifications, which rates all three boards at 300W and lists the PRO 5000 Blackwell in 48GB and 72GB versions; Hardware Corner’s page does not say which one it benchmarked.

Two things follow. The 70B row exists only for 48GB cards — Hardware Corner’s RTX 3090, RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 pages carry no Llama 3.3 70B measurement at all, and the 3090 and 4090 pages say why in one line: 24GB cannot hold the file. The only 4090 with a 70B row on that site is the modified 48GB variant, which is a different card. And the spread inside the tier is nearly 2x, entirely on architecture: the same 48GB and the same 300W, five years apart, gets you 12.6 or 24.0 tokens per second.

The A6000 is the cheap way in and it is the slow one. That is the trade you are making.

For contrast, here is 16GB

I measured a retail RTX 5080 across four models with Ollama at temperature 0, three fresh-prefill runs per cell, and published the throughput dataset as open CSV. gpt-oss 20B in MXFP4 decodes at 178 to 190 tokens per second across two dated captures, fully resident in about 14GB. Qwen 2.5 14B at Q4_K_M runs 94 to 97.

That is fifteen times the A6000’s 70B rate on a card costing a quarter as much. The 20B is not the same model and nobody should pretend it is — but in my own eight-task coding evaluation gpt-oss 20B passed all eight, including two-turn tool calling. The gap in delivered usefulness is much narrower than the gap in parameter count, and the gap in speed runs the other way by an order of magnitude.

Hardware Corner’s own A6000 table makes the same point on one board: Qwen3 30B A3B, a mixture-of-experts model, runs at 131.2 tokens per second on the card where the dense 70B manages 12.6. Ten times faster, same silicon.

The electricity is the cheap part

Divide a published power rating into a published token rate and you get the electricity per million tokens. At NVIDIA’s 300W rating for the professional 48GB boards, and the EIA US residential average of 18.34 cents per kilowatt-hour for June 2026:

Workload	Rate	kWh per 1M tokens	Cost per 1M tokens
Llama 3.3 70B, A6000, 16K ctx	9.1 t/s	9.16	$1.68
Llama 3.3 70B, A6000, 4K ctx	12.6 t/s	6.61	$1.21
Llama 3.3 70B, RTX PRO 5000, 4K ctx	24.0 t/s	3.47	$0.64
Qwen 2.5 14B, my RTX 5080	98.8 t/s	0.88	$0.16
gpt-oss 20B, my RTX 5080	194.4 t/s	0.42	$0.08

The 5080 rows are measured — board power sampled at 1Hz alongside the generation that produced the rate, published in the power-efficiency dataset, which is why their rates differ slightly from the throughput capture above. The 70B rows pair Hardware Corner’s token rates with NVIDIA’s rated wattage, so they are ceilings: a card that draws less than 300W lands under them.

Even the worst row on this table is under two dollars per million tokens. Running the 70B costs roughly sixteen times what running gpt-oss 20B costs, and sixteen times almost nothing is still almost nothing. Anyone budgeting a local 70B around its power draw is solving the wrong problem.

The watts that do matter are the idle ones. My 5080 holds 52 to 71W at the Windows desktop rather than the 8 to 15W reviews quote, which is $85 to $115 a year before a single token. A mostly-idle inference node’s bill is set by what it does the other twenty-three hours. I have not measured an A6000’s idle draw, so there is no number for it here. The logic still applies, and it applies twice to a two-card machine.

Two used 3090s are the value answer at 48GB

Two RTX 3090s total 48GB, which clears 42.52GB with the same 5.48GB of headroom a single 48GB board gives you. NVIDIA lists the 3090 at 24GB GDDR6X and 350W.

The price is why people do it. Hardware Corner’s two published figures for a used 3090 disagree: its dual-GPU comparison puts a used RTX 3090 at “around $800”, while the price panel on its RTX 3090 benchmark page states a $1,000 market average. They are the same publisher on two pages with different update dates, and the used market moves fast enough that both can have been right when written. Call it $1,600 to $2,000 for the pair and price the actual listing in front of you.

Against a $5,490.00 new A6000, that is a third of the price for the same capacity. It is the value answer and it has been for years.

What you give up is not subtle. 700W of card rating instead of 300W. Two boards’ worth of idle draw. Two slots, the airflow between them, and a power supply sized for both. Blower-style cards exist to be stacked in a chassis rather than to sit near you, and you will hear it. Neither card carries a warranty you can rely on, and no standalone RTX 3090 appears anywhere in the August 17 Newegg feed: the rows that name the card are water blocks, cables, cooling parts and prebuilt systems containing one, and not a single graphics card. This is a used-market purchase with used-market recourse.

Splitting buys capacity, not speed

The thing people expect from two cards is twice the throughput. They do not get it, and the reason is in llama.cpp’s own argument documentation, which describes the default split mode as splitting “layers and KV across GPUs (pipelined)” against the row and tensor modes it labels “parallelized”. Pipelined means the layers on card two wait for the layers on card one. Only one GPU is computing at a time.

Hardware Corner’s dual-card test shows the shape of it from the other direction. Testing two RTX 5060 Ti 16GB against one RTX 3090 with llama.cpp, the pair reached 131K context on a 30B MoE model and 45K on a dense 32B, well past what the single card sustained — while the single 3090 generated dense-model tokens roughly twice as fast at 4K to 16K context. Capacity to the pair, speed to the one fast card.

That comparison varies bandwidth as well as card count, and Hardware Corner attributes the speed gap to bandwidth explicitly, so read it narrowly: a second card reliably buys you memory and does not reliably buy you tokens per second. No dual-3090 70B rate appears in Hardware Corner’s tables — its 48GB 70B rows are all single cards — so treat the 12.6 to 24.0 range above as the tier’s speed and do not expect two 3090s to beat it because there are two of them.

NVLink does not rescue this either. It moves the needle for training and for concurrent users. One person typing is neither.

Do not buy hardware for a dense 70B

Buy a 16GB-class card and run a mixture-of-experts model. That is the recommendation for nearly everyone who arrives at this question, and the numbers above are why: 178 to 190 tokens per second on my own measurement against 12.6 on the cheapest board that holds the dense 70B, for a quarter of the price and a sixteenth of the electricity per token.

The cheapest RTX 5080 in the August feed was $1,399.99 , and thirteen boards in all sat between that price and $1,999.99, so there is room to shop the exact model.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Prices move. Check before you order, and run your context budget through the VRAM calculator before you commit to any card — the 5.48GB of headroom a 48GB board leaves a 70B is enough for ordinary context and not for long context, and that failure arrives mid-session rather than at load time.

If a dense 70B is genuinely the requirement

Some workloads want the dense model and nothing else will do. In that case: two used RTX 3090s. A third of the price of a new A6000 for the same 48GB, at the cost of 700W of card rating, two slots, the noise and no warranty worth the name.

Buy a single 48GB board instead when you are paying for the things the pair cannot give you — one slot, 300W, ECC memory, the enterprise driver branch, and a card you can put in a case without planning the airflow around it. Hardware Corner states a $4,600 market average for a used A6000 against the $5,490.00 new list; a used listing asking near the new price is not a deal, because the discount is the only reason to accept a 2020 board with somebody else’s hours on it.

How this was checked

The capacity table uses exact byte counts from the Hugging Face repository API for the bartowski Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-GGUF repo, not rounded parameter math. Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf is 42,520,398,816 bytes.

The 70B speed figures are Hardware Corner’s, published March 2026 and captured with llama.cpp’s llama-bench on Ubuntu 24.04 with CUDA 12.8 at 4-bit. I did not benchmark a 70B model.

The 16GB figures are mine: a retail ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC under Ollama at temperature 0, three fresh-prefill runs per cell for throughput, and board power sampled at 1Hz over the same generations for the efficiency figures. Both raw CSVs are published CC BY 4.0 at /data/rtx-5080-llm-throughput/ and /data/rtx-5080-llm-power-efficiency/.

Card memory and power ratings come from NVIDIA’s own specification pages. The kilowatt-hours and dollars per million tokens are arithmetic dividing a rated wattage into a measured token rate at the June 2026 EIA residential average of $0.1834/kWh; the 70B rows are ceilings because a rated maximum is not a measured draw.

Prices are the lowest in-stock USD offer per exact model from the August 17 Newegg feed. Every used-card figure on this page is Hardware Corner’s stated market value, named as theirs where it appears.

This page gets re-checked when a new 48GB-class card ships or a major 70B release changes the file size.

Minisforum MS-01: Reviewed as a 24/7 Hypervisor Node

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Most mini PC reviews measure the machine on a desk. The question worth asking about this one is different: what it does when nobody logs into it locally, when its job is to hold VMs up around the clock, and when the thing plugged into the back of it is a DAC rather than a monitor.

Judged that way, the MS-01 is still the node I’d buy. The reason is the four network ports, and almost everything else on this page is a cost you accept to get them.

Four network ports is the whole argument

Minisforum publishes two 10Gbps SFP+ ports and two 2.5Gbps RJ45 ports, a “PCIe 4.0 x16 slot (Half-height, single-slot, supports up to PCIe 4.0 x8 speed)”, three M.2 2280 NVMe slots and a 64GB DDR5 ceiling (MINISFORUM specification). Edy Werder identifies the SFP+ pair as Intel X710 and the 2.5GbE pair as Intel I225 in his Proxmox review.

On a desktop that is a spec-sheet flex. On a hypervisor it changes the architecture:

Management gets its own port, so a broken bridge on the VM network does not lock you out of the box.
Storage gets the 10G pair, separate from everything else moving over the 2.5GbE side.
A firewall VM gets real WAN and LAN interfaces instead of a USB adapter, which is the limitation that ends most single-port mini PC builds.

That is four physical interfaces to assign, in a chassis you can put on a shelf. The mini PC roundup covers the rest of the field on price and cores; this page is about what happens when the box has to stay up.

One correction to the story people tell about this machine. The MS-01 was the only box at this size doing four ports, and it is not any more. Minisforum’s own MS-A2 lists the same count — “10G SFP+(Intel X710) x 2” plus two 2.5Gb RJ45 on an Intel I226-V and a Realtek RTL8125 — and it is not automatically the pricier machine. MS-A2 barebones ran $439 for the Ryzen 7 7745HX and $799 for the Ryzen 9 9955HX, against $679 for the MS-01’s i9-13900H barebone (MS-A2 listing, MS-01 listing, both read September 7, 2026). The MS-01 is still my pick. At new-unit pricing it is a closer call than it was a year ago.

Idle is higher than people expect, and the published numbers disagree

Source	Configuration	Idle
ServeTheHome	their test system	25–29W
scottstuff.net	i5-12600H, Ubuntu 24.04, no add-in card	13.2W
scottstuff.net	i9-13900H, Ubuntu 24.04, no add-in card	14.4W
scottstuff.net	same two machines, Mellanox ConnectX-5 fitted	32.1W / 27.1W
Edy Werder	Proxmox, stock CPU governor	~53W at the wall
Edy Werder	Proxmox, governor changed	~28W at the wall

Nobody in that table is wrong. Thirteen watts and twenty-nine watts are the same computer with a different operating system, a different card in the slot and a different governor. Idle draw on this machine depends far more on the OS, the NIC and the tuning than it does on the model number, which is why the question “what does an MS-01 idle at” has no answer worth quoting.

What survives across all of it: idle is higher than people expect from something this size. If low idle is your actual goal, buy an N100 box. Those sit at 7 to 14 watts, and the 24/7 power cost page turns the difference into a yearly bill. The MS-01’s floor is what four network controllers cost you.

The card you put in the slot changes the machine

scottstuff.net measured the same two machines with and without a Mellanox ConnectX-5. The card moved the i5-12600H from 13.2W to 32.1W and the i9-13900H from 14.4W to 27.1W.

That is thirteen to nineteen watts of continuous heat added to a chassis with no spare room, in a bay Minisforum specifies as half-height and single-slot, so the card has no fan of its own. The chassis could not carry it: Scott Laird had to run “a very hefty AC muffin fan” through the machines to stop the NICs overheating and shutting down near 115 °C, and that external fan’s draw is not in the figures above. A hot add-in NIC in that slot changes the machine’s entire power and thermal profile, not just its power figure.

Plan the airflow before you buy the card. After it arrives is too late to find out the slot was the wrong place for it.

The fan is louder under a hypervisor than under Windows

This is the thing nobody warns you about, and it is the difference between a machine you keep in the office and one you move to a closet.

The stock curve is aggressive and it does not know the difference between a burst and a workload. A hypervisor hands it bursts constantly — a backup kicking off, a VM booting, a scrub starting — and it answers every one of them as though a sustained load had begun. Under Windows the same hardware sounds like a different machine.

It is not quiet to begin with. ServeTheHome measured 37–38 dBA at idle against a 34.5 dBA noise floor, rising into the 44 dBA range under load.

The fix is usually upstream of the fan. Edy Werder logged an 82–88 °C baseline across thirty days on Proxmox, found the cause in the CPU governor rather than the chassis, and saw 57–58 °C afterwards. The fan was doing its job. The governor was giving it a reason.

The SFP+ side runs hot

Two 10G controllers and their cages sit inside a box with nothing to spare. If this machine is throttling and you are looking for the cause, start at the SFP+ end, not at the CPU.

Optics make it worse than direct-attach copper. In scottstuff.net’s pair one machine ran fibre and the other DAC, and Scott Laird notes the fibre “should have added about 6W to the total” across the two. That is dissipated in the transceiver cage rather than spread across the board.

The BIOS is thin

Expect to update it, and expect to touch power limits.

Two entries from the release history are enough to explain why. BIOS v1.26 added “C-State is supported” along with a microcode update; v1.27 added Turbo Ratio Limit options and adjusted power limits per processor (VirtualizationHowto’s update walkthrough, files on the MINISFORUM support page).

Read that next to the idle table. C-states are the mechanism that decides whether a 24/7 node sits at thirteen watts or twenty-nine, and support for them arrived in a firmware update. If you bought early and never flashed, the machine cannot reach the low numbers other people are publishing.

Flash it on mains power you control. VirtualizationHowto’s warning is the right one: losing power mid-flash can brick it.

Buy it refurbished

Minisforum sells the MS-01 refurbished itself, and that is where I’d buy one.

On September 7, 2026 the refurbished store listed the i9-13900H barebone at $537, against a $799 compare-at price, with a stated one-year warranty and no stand in the box (Refurbished MINISFORUM). The same barebone new, on the main store, was $679 that day. Both are barebone — no RAM, no storage, either way.

Read the stock before you plan around it. The configured refurbished units that day — 32GB with a 512GB SSD at $619, 64GB with 1TB at $769 — were all out of stock. The barebone was the only i9-13900H refurbished option available.

A $142 gap on an identical barebone is the recommendation. At that price, four ports, a PCIe slot and three M.2 slots is a straightforward yes. At $679 new I’d think harder, because that sits above an MS-A2 barebone with the same port count — and ServeTheHome’s MS-A2 numbers do not rescue you on the two complaints above either, at 25W idle, 39 dBA idle and 50 dBA under load (MS-A2 review).

Search NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Prices move and refurbished stock comes and goes. Check both stores before you order.

Who should not buy one

If you need ECC memory and IPMI, this is the wrong machine. It has neither, and no BIOS update adds them. That tradeoff is the whole subject of the used enterprise versus mini PC comparison.

If you want silence on a desk, buy something else. 37–38 dBA at idle on a 34.5 dBA floor is not a desk machine, and a hypervisor makes it worse rather than better.

If you are chasing genuinely low idle, buy an N100 box. Nothing on this page gets an MS-01 into single digits, and four network controllers are the reason.

If you are dropping a hot card in the slot, solve airflow first. Nineteen watts of extra heat in a half-height bay with no fan of its own is a decision, not a detail.

Everyone else: the four ports are worth it, and refurbished is the price at which they are clearly worth it.

NAS Software at Month Eight: DSM, UGOS Pro, TOS, QTS

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The first month goes well on all of them. Drives spin up, shares mount, the phone app finds the photos, the transfer speed matches the box. Every NAS sold today clears that bar.

Month eight is the test. By then the hardware is a thing humming in a closet and what you are actually touching is the software — the backup scheduler, the container manager, the app you turned out to need six months after you bought the thing. Good hardware carries the first month. What is left at month eight is the software, and that is where these four separate. It is also where almost nobody reviews them.

The drive policy got walked back. The transcoding did not.

Synology’s verified-drive requirement on the 2025 Plus line is why I stopped recommending them for most of last year. Not because I could not work around it. Because it told me where the product was heading.

Then they reversed it. Synology’s DSM 7.3 announcement of October 8, 2025 says that “25 model year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J series running DSM 7.3 will support the installation and storage pool creation of non-validated third-party drives.” One carve-out survives in the same announcement: “Creation of M.2 based storage pool and cache still requires drives on the HCL.” Fill the bays with whatever you want — the drive-level maths is unchanged now that the policy is gone — and you still need a Synology-listed NVMe to build a cache.

That reversal did not bring me back on its own. Synology-branded drives cost real money over the equivalent Exos and I was never able to identify what the premium bought — but the drives were the symptom, not the thing.

The thing that bothers me more is the one that did not get walked back, and almost nobody talks about it.

The DS425+ ships an Intel Celeron J4125. Intel’s own specification page for that chip lists UHD Graphics 600 and, on its own row, “Intel Quick Sync Video: Yes.” Synology’s spec sheet for the DS425+ lists the same J4125 and no video-transcoding section at all. The silicon is in the box and the driver is not. XDA’s Rich Edmonds walked through putting the removed drivers back by hand on October 21, 2025, using a community script that covers the DS925, DS425 and DS225 — which tells you the capability is sitting there.

The DS925+ makes it structural. Synology’s own spec sheet gives it an AMD Ryzen V1500B and, again, no transcoding section. That part ships without integrated graphics at all — worth saying plainly, because the XDA piece describes the DS925 as having an iGPU it is not allowed to use, and on this model the silicon is simply absent. One chip cannot do the work. The other can and is not permitted to. A drive policy reverses in a point release. This one is the roadmap.

If transcoding is the reason you are buying, the NAS transcoding guide sorts the current field by that spec alone.

Check the manufacturer’s spec sheet, not the retailer’s

Worth thirty seconds before you order. Newegg’s listing for this box carries the full product name “Synology 4-bay DiskStation DS925+ - 4GB DDR4 ECC SODIMM Intel Celeron J4125 Processor Diskless System,” and the same J4125 turns up again in its specification table. Synology says AMD Ryzen V1500B for the same model. The word “Ryzen” does not appear on the retailer page.

Buy on the Intel line in that listing and you are expecting a Quick Sync engine that the machine does not have. This is not a Synology-specific hazard, but it lands hardest here, because the Intel chip named in that row is exactly the one people buy these for.

The four boxes, as sold

Four-bay, diskless, opened on Newegg September 7:

Box	CPU	Memory	Fastest port	Hardware transcode	OS
Synology DS925+	AMD Ryzen V1500B	4GB DDR4 ECC	2.5GbE ×2	none	DSM 7.3
UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus	Intel Pentium Gold 8505	8GB DDR5, to 64GB	10GbE	Quick Sync	UGOS Pro
TerraMaster F4-424 Pro	Intel Core i3-N305	32GB DDR5, one slot	2.5GbE ×2	Intel UHD	TOS
QNAP TS-464	Intel Celeron N5095	8GB DDR4, to 16GB	2.5GbE ×2	Intel UHD	QTS 5 / QuTS hero

Prices the same day: $889.99 for the DS925+, $656.99 for the UGREEN, $859.99 for the F4-424 Pro sold by TerraMaster’s own Newegg storefront. The TS-464 page carried offers from $379.99 to $742.21 depending on the seller, which is its own reason to read the seller name before the price.

Maker’s sheets for the specs: UGREEN’s for the OS features, TerraMaster’s for the F4-424 Pro, QNAP’s for the TS-464.

UGREEN sells the hardware Synology stopped selling

$656.99 against $889.99. For $233 less, the UGREEN has 10GbE where the Synology has 2.5GbE, DDR5 where the Synology has DDR4, headroom to 64GB where the Synology ships 4GB, and a Pentium Gold 8505 — a 2022 Intel part with UHD graphics and Quick Sync listed on Intel’s own page — where the Synology has an embedded chip with no video path at all.

That is the whole UGREEN pitch and every line of it is true. It is also the trap, because every line of it is a month-one comparison.

UGOS Pro is not finished

The app catalogue runs out fast. UGREEN’s own OS page leads with Docker (“Deploy containerized apps for media, automation, development, and self-hosted services”) and a virtual-machine app (“Run virtual machines on your NAS to test operating systems, host services, or build separate work environments without extra hardware”), and those two carry more weight on UGOS Pro than they do on DSM, because anything past the basics ends up in a container you assemble yourself.

If you were going to write compose files anyway, that is a feature and the price gap is free money. If you bought an appliance specifically so you would not have to, it is the thing you discover in month three and are still living with in month eight.

That is not a prediction about UGREEN’s future. Software ecosystems fill in. It is a statement about what you get if you order one this week.

TerraMaster: on sale, not at list

TOS sits in the same place as UGOS Pro and arrives less polished, with a smaller ecosystem around it. The HDMI port gets sold as a differentiator — TerraMaster’s spec sheet lists one HDMI 2.0b output — and what it gives you is a console. I have not found anything else to do with it.

At $859.99 the F4-424 Pro is $203 more than the UGREEN and spends the difference on a second 2.5GbE port instead of a 10GbE one. It does ship 32GB of DDR5, more than anything else on this page, in a single non-upgradable slot, which is a real advantage if you are running containers and a dead end if you later want more.

I would buy this on sale. I would not buy it at list.

QNAP: the interface was never the problem

QTS is fine. It has been fine for years, and QuTS hero gives you ZFS if you want it — the storage backend comparison covers what that buys you.

The exposure history is the problem. QNAP’s own DeadBolt advisory tells owners to “Disable the port forwarding function on the router” and to set up myQNAPcloud “to enable secure remote access and prevent exposure to the internet.” The company still runs a standing product-security advisory feed, which is the correct thing to do and also the thing you are signing up to follow.

I would not put a QNAP on the public internet. I would not put anything else there either — that half is not a QNAP rule. But this is the box where the history makes it impossible to wave off, and QNAP is wrong for you if you will not keep firmware current.

What nobody can tell you yet

UGREEN and TerraMaster are too new for me to tell you anything about multi-year reliability. Neither can anyone else. Synology and QNAP have a decade of field behaviour behind them; the other two do not have it yet, and no review published this year has it either.

That is not a mark against them. It is a thing you are accepting when you buy one, and it should be worth something to you in the price.

Buy the Synology unless you need hardware transcoding

Synology still makes the best NAS operating system, and I say that as someone who spent most of 2025 not recommending them. If the software is what you are still using at month eight, buy for the software.

Buy the DS925+ if hardware transcoding is not in your plans. You are paying $233 over the UGREEN for DSM and a decade of field history, and giving up the 10GbE port to get them. That is the trade, and it is worth making if the software is what you will be living in.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Buy the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus if you need Plex or Jellyfin to transcode, or if you have a 10GbE switch and something fast enough to feed it. You are getting more hardware for less money and accepting an app catalogue that will send you to Docker. Go in knowing that is the trade rather than finding it out in month three.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Prices move, and two of these pages carry marketplace sellers. Check the price and the seller before you order.

Wrong for

UGREEN and TerraMaster are wrong if you want a finished app ecosystem and no tinkering.

A 2025 Synology is wrong if you want hardware transcoding — no model in that line does it, driver or silicon — or if you were counting on a third-party NVMe cache, which is the one piece DSM 7.3 did not reopen.

QNAP is wrong if you will not keep firmware current.

All four are wrong if what you actually want is a machine you administer yourself. That is a different purchase with a different failure mode, and the storage backends are where it starts.

Prebuilt PC Warranties: Read the Panel, Not the Bullet

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Two hundred and eighty-one RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 desktops sit in Newegg’s August 17 product feed. Not one of them contains the word warranty — not in the title, not in either description field.

Five of the six pages I opened state a term anyway. The sixth states none at all.

That gap is the whole problem. The machine-readable text behind a listing — the text a price comparison site, a shopping engine, or an AI shopping answer reads — says nothing at all about coverage for this entire category. The coverage lives somewhere else, in a panel on the product page that the feed never carries. And opening that panel does not always settle it: across six listings it did three different things.

The listing text does not know

Newegg’s August 17 feed carries 13,254 in-stock, USD-priced desktop listings. Search every title and both description fields for a stated warranty duration and 4,216 match. The other 9,038 say nothing.

That two-thirds silence looks like a finding until you see who the matches belong to:

Brand on the matching rows	Rows
Adamant Custom	4,157
HP	45
HAJAAN	14

One builder’s description template accounts for 4,157 of the 4,216 matches. Strip it out and 59 listings in the whole desktop category state a warranty period in their feed text. Only 47 rows put a term in the title at all. The two description fields are byte-identical on 13,253 of the 13,254 rows, so they are one piece of evidence wearing two hats, not two.

This is not a census of which builders stand behind their machines. It is a census of which builders happened to type a warranty line into a product description — and almost nobody does.

What the pages actually say

Six listings, opened September 7, 2026. Every period below belongs to the exact item number linked in Sources.

Machine	Sold and shipped by	Warranty, and where it is stated	Refund / replacement
ABS Kaze II Ruby (N82E16883360966)	Newegg	Panel: 1 year parts, 1 year labor	15 / 15 days, Newegg
STORMCRAFT Phantom (N82E16883420046)	Newegg	Panel: 2 years parts, 3 years labor	15 / 15 days, Newegg
STORMCRAFT Valkyrie (N82E16883420063)	Newegg	Panel: 2 years parts, 3 years labor	15 / 15 days, Newegg
Andromeda Insights 50 V3 (3D5-006J-00058)	Newegg	Bullets only: 2 years parts, lifetime labor and lifetime service, US based. Panel records no period	15 / 15 days, Newegg
Skytech Tempest (9SIA1HJM5T7140)	Skytech	Bullet only: 1 year parts and labor. Panel says contact the seller	30 / 30 days, Skytech
CLX Horus (9SIABFSKF91483)	CLX	Panel says contact the seller. No period stated anywhere on the page	30 / 60 days, CLX

Five of those six are among the 281 feed rows that mention no warranty. The sixth is a marketplace item that is not in that snapshot at all.

Three ways a listing misleads you

Silence is not absence. The ABS listing’s feed text has no warranty word in it. Its product page records one year of parts and one year of labor. Any tool that summarizes listings — including a chatbot reading a product feed — will report nothing and be wrong.

The longest promise is not always the recorded one. Andromeda’s bullets promise two years of parts plus lifetime labor and lifetime service from a US-based team. Newegg’s Warranty & Returns panel on that same page carries the return windows and no warranty period at all. Both statements are on the page; only one of them is in the retailer’s field. If Andromeda’s lifetime labor is why you are buying, get it confirmed in email by Andromeda inside the 15 days, while a refund is still on the table.

A replacement window is not a refund window. CLX gives 30 days for a refund and 60 for a replacement. Read “60-day returns” off that page and you will spend a month believing you can still get your money back after you cannot.

Who actually fixes it

Sold and shipped by Newegg tells you who owns the sale, the shipping and the return window. It does not tell you who repairs the computer. On the STORMCRAFT and ABS pages, the warranty route is a Manufacturer Contact Info block carrying the builder’s own support phone and email — STORMCRAFT’s is 1-949-226-8899. Newegg records the term. The builder does the work.

On marketplace listings the split is wider. Newegg’s help pages state that on a marketplace product page the return policy shown is the seller’s policy rather than Newegg’s, and that each marketplace seller sets its own terms on its profile. You can still start the return from your Newegg order history, and Newegg says that route works the same way it does for any other order. Starting a return through Newegg’s interface is not the same as buying under Newegg’s terms.

Then there is the handoff. When the return window closes, the return route is gone and the recorded warranty term is what remains. On a Newegg-sold machine that is 15 days, which is not long to find a fault that shows up under load.

Buy the STORMCRAFT

Two years of parts and three years of labor, written into Newegg’s own warranty fields, on a machine Newegg sells and ships. That is the longest recorded term of the six, and STORMCRAFT carries it at both tiers — the Valkyrie with an RTX 5090, the Phantom with an RTX 5080.

The comparison that decides it is the ABS Kaze II Ruby. Same retailer, same 15-day window, one year of parts and one year of labor. Our RTX 5080 survey found the Phantom and the ABS level on price on September 1, which makes the coverage the entire difference between them. The RTX 5090 survey reaches the same pick from the hardware side.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Two things would change the pick.

You want longer than 15 days to test it. Skytech and CLX both give 30. That is a genuine trade — a longer window to find a fault in exchange for a warranty term the retailer never records — and it is only worth taking if you will actually stress the machine in weeks three and four rather than let it sit.

The hardware wins on its own. Nothing here says buy a worse computer for a better warranty. It says that when two machines are close, the recorded term is a real difference and the bullet is not one.

What would not change the pick: the CLX listing on warranty grounds. It states no period anywhere, which is not a short warranty — it is no published warranty.

Two questions to get answered in writing

What happens in year three. STORMCRAFT’s parts coverage ends a year before its labor coverage does. Ask what a failed component costs you between month 25 and month 36, because a labor-only year covers the technician and not the part.

Who pays shipping. None of these six pages says who ships a tower back for warranty work, or who pays for it. On a heavy glass-sided case that is not a small question.

Ask both before the return window closes, while sending the machine back is still an option.

How this was checked

The census reads Newegg’s Rakuten product feed deposited August 17, 2026, retaining rows in the Desktop Computers category marked in-stock, priced in USD, with a positive price: 13,254 listings, one per SKU. Title and both description fields are searched separately for a warranty duration phrase, then combined once per row so a duplicated description cannot count twice.

Detection is lexical, and a phrasing the pattern does not recognize reads as silence. A machine reading that feed sees the same silence, which is exactly why the feed is the wrong place to look for coverage.

The six product pages and both Newegg policy pages were opened September 7, 2026, and the terms above are what those pages state. No warranty claim was submitted and no repair was timed, so this ranks what a buyer can verify before paying, not how the repair goes afterwards.

Terms change without notice. Open the Warranty & Returns tab on the exact item number before you pay, and confirm the buy box still names the seller you expect.

Sources, opened September 7, 2026

ABS Kaze II Ruby: Newegg listing
STORMCRAFT Phantom: Newegg listing
STORMCRAFT Valkyrie: Newegg listing
Andromeda Insights 50 V3: Newegg listing
Skytech Tempest: Newegg listing
CLX Horus: Newegg listing
Finding an item’s return policy — Newegg Knowledge Base, updated July 21, 2026
Marketplace: returns and contacting sellers — Newegg Knowledge Base, updated July 21, 2026
Feed counts: Newegg product feed via Rakuten (MID 44583), deposit dated August 17, 2026, SHA-256 c86e341bb7026259f9d5f63db51752e257911d1f45fd494ac1def94893768ae6

RTX 5090 Prebuilt Power Disclosure: 82 Listings Audited

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Twelve RTX 5090 prebuilts were surveyed for the September buying guide, and one thing about them would not go away: not one said which cable fed the card. Twelve listings is an observation. It is not a finding.

So this page checks all of them.

Some retailer links below are affiliate links; if you buy through them TechFuel HQ may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Commissions never influence what gets recommended — see our disclosure. Eighty-two in-stock RTX 5090 systems, $5,300 to $22,090, from Newegg’s August 17, 2026 product feed. The result is more specific than the original observation, and in one respect it is the opposite of what “power supply problem” usually means.

The wattage is fine. That is the surprise.

Seventy-five of the 82 listings state a power-supply wattage. Every single one of those 75 meets or exceeds the 1000W system power NVIDIA specifies for the RTX 5090. The stated figures run 1000W to 1300W, median 1000W. Not one comes in under.

This is worth saying plainly because the reflex in this category is to assume the builder skimped on the supply. In this sample, on this measure, they did not.

What the listing states	Count	Share
A power-supply wattage	75 / 82	91%
An efficiency rating (80 Plus, Gold, etc.)	17 / 82	21%
An ATX 3.x revision	5 / 82	6%
The cable or connector standard	0 / 82	0%

The disclosure does not taper off. It falls off a cliff, and it falls off exactly where this generation of card has had trouble.

Why the cable is the field that matters

The RTX 5090 draws 575W of total graphics power through a 12V-2x6 connector — the revised 16-pin design introduced with ATX 3.0 and tightened in ATX 3.1. The wattage headline and the connector are different questions, and only one of them is answered on these pages.

A 1000W supply can be an older unit with an adapter, or a current ATX 3.1 unit with a native 12V-2x6 cable. Both satisfy the number in the specification table. They are not the same purchase. Six percent of these listings tell you which one you are getting.

That is the finding. Not that these machines are underpowered — they are not — but that the single field most worth knowing at this price is the one field nobody fills in.

The other thing the census found

Eight of the 82 listings, priced from $5,783 to $6,989, pair the RTX 5090 with a DDR4 platform on the Ryzen 9 5900X. That processor launched in 2020.

Nothing here is broken and these machines will run games well. But at $6,989 you are buying a 2026 flagship graphics card bolted to a six-year-old memory generation on a socket with no upgrade path left. If you take one habit from this page, take this one: on a prebuilt, read the memory type before you read the graphics card. The GPU is in the title. The platform generation usually is not.

Which listings disclosed the most

Seven listings state both an efficiency rating and an ATX 3.x revision, or state a rating alongside a supply of 1200W or more. They are not necessarily the best machines. They are the ones that told you the most before you paid.

Machine	Stated supply	Price (2026-08-17 feed)
Thermaltake LCGS View 9890S-380XL (9800X3D)	1200W, 80+ Gold, ATX 3.0	$6,090.99
Skytech Legacy (Ryzen 9 9950X3D)	1200W, rated, ATX 3.x	$6,299.99
Skytech Legacy (Ultra 9 285K)	1200W, rated, ATX 3.x	$5,999.99
Skytech Legacy (Ryzen 9 9900X3D)	1000W, rated, ATX 3.x	$5,999.99
Skytech O11 Vision / King 95 (7800X3D)	1200W, rated	$5,499.99

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Prices and stock are as recorded in the August 17 feed deposit and will have moved. Confirm both on the listing before buying.

What to ask before you pay

The listings will not tell you, so ask the seller. Four questions, in order of how much they cost you to get wrong:

Is the power supply ATX 3.0 or ATX 3.1? This determines whether it was designed around the 12V-2x6 connector and the transient behaviour of this card class.
Is the GPU cable native, or an adapter? A native cable from an ATX 3.x supply is the configuration the card was specified against.
What is the efficiency rating? Four fifths of these listings do not say. At 575W sustained from the card alone, it is not a trivial line.
What memory generation is the platform? Eight machines here answer this badly and none of them say so in the title.

If a seller will not answer 1 and 2 in writing, that is information too.

Method, so you can repeat it

Every row is from the Newegg product feed supplied through Rakuten Advertising (MID 44583), deposited 2026-08-17.

Selection. Product name matches rtx 5090 and a desktop/gaming-PC/workstation term; row is in-stock; price ≥ $3,000. That yields 82 rows.
Field matching. The product name and both description fields are concatenated, then matched with fixed patterns: wattage from power supply: NNNNw or NNNNw psu; efficiency from 80 plus/gold/platinum/bronze/titanium; revision from atx 3.0/atx 3.1; cable from 12vhpwr/12v-2x6/16-pin.
Verification. One listing was opened live on 2026-09-07 and its specification string matched the feed exactly. Its stock state had changed since the deposit, which is the expected behaviour of a dated snapshot and the reason nothing here is presented as a current quote.

Open data: prebuilt-psu-disclosure-2026-08-17.csv — 82 rows, CC BY 4.0. Columns: sku, price, brand, psu_watts, efficiency_stated, atx3_stated, cable_stated, ddr4_platform, name.

Scope

This is a census of what the listings say, not of what is inside the machines. Several of these builders may well ship native ATX 3.1 cables — the point is that you cannot tell before you pay, and at $6,000 you should be able to. Nothing here says any of these systems is unsafe.

Sizing a supply for a card yourself rather than buying prebuilt? The PSU wattage calculator estimates draw with headroom, and what PSU an RTX 5080 needs works the same question one tier down.

RTX 5090 Prebuilts: What the $2,400 Premium Buys

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Two towers from the same builder. Same processor, same memory, same drives, same Windows. One has an RTX 5080 in it and one has an RTX 5090.

The gap is $2,400, and nothing else in the box changes.

That is worth knowing before you read a spec sheet that describes the more expensive machine as the higher-end system, because in the fields the seller publishes, it is not a higher-end system. It is the same system with a different card.

The matched pair

Published field	Horus TGMHORRTU5103BM	Horus TGMHORRTZ5108BM
Graphics	RTX 5080 16GB	RTX 5090 32GB
Processor	Core Ultra 9 285K	Core Ultra 9 285K
Memory	96GB DDR5	96GB DDR5
SSD	2TB NVMe	2TB NVMe
Hard drive	8TB	8TB
OS	Windows 11 Home	Windows 11 Home
Power supply	850W	1000W
Price	$4,699.99	$7,099.99

Everything but the card and the supply is identical as published. Both listings were reopened on September 7 and still matched.

It holds across the field

The pair could be a quirk of one builder, so here is the same test run across every RTX 5080 and 5090 desktop in the August feed, grouped by exact processor, memory capacity and SSD description:

Matched configuration	Listings 5080 / 5090	Premium
Ryzen 7 9800X3D · 32GB · 2TB NVMe	12 / 1	$2,550
Ryzen 7 9800X3D · 64GB · 4TB NVMe	5 / 2	$2,050
Ryzen 9 9950X3D · 64GB · 4TB NVMe	1 / 1	$1,800
Core Ultra 9 285K · 96GB · 2TB NVMe	2 / 2	$2,515.50

$1,800 to $2,550, every time, for the card alone. Some of those groups are small — the row counts are in the table — so read them as the size of the question to put to a seller, not as a fixed fee.

Buy the 5080

Start from the RTX 5080 quote. It is the same computer.

Move up only if you can name what the card does for you that the 5080 does not — 4K at high refresh, or a workload that genuinely needs 32GB of VRAM rather than 16GB. Those are real reasons and the GPU-level comparison settles them properly, with benchmarks this page does not attempt.

What is not a reason: the more expensive tower being described as the better machine. On the published fields, it is not.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Two things to get in writing

What changes besides the card. These listings match on capacity, which is not the same as matching on component. Ask for the exact motherboard, drive model, cooler and warranty terms on both machines before you accept that they are otherwise the same box. Worth knowing what you are asking for: of six prebuilt listings opened in detail, five state a warranty term and one states none at all.

What feeds the card. Our census of 82 RTX 5090 systems found 91% state a supply wattage, 21% state an efficiency rating, 6% state an ATX 3.x revision, and none names the connector. At $7,000 that is a fair question to make someone answer.

The 5080 survey and 5090 survey carry the per-seller detail. Prices here are from the August 17 feed and will have moved — check before ordering.

Six-Bay NAS Drives: The Rebuild Math at 20TB+

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Twenty-four terabytes takes the better part of a day to copy at the drive maker’s own best-case number. A rebuild is messier than that. And the rebuild is exactly when you find out whether you bought the right layout.

The NAS hard drive guide covers which drives are good. This page answers the next question: which 20TB-plus drives belong in a six-bay box once rebuild time and failure behaviour are part of the price?

Bigger is not reliably cheaper per terabyte

Nine exact model numbers, lowest in-stock price each, August 2026:

Model	20TB	22TB	24TB
Seagate Exos	$791.99 — $39.60/TB	$983.50 — $44.70/TB	$948.00 — $39.50/TB
WD Red Pro	$836.99 — $41.85/TB	$879.99 — $40.00/TB	$1,059.99 — $44.17/TB
Toshiba MG	$889.99 — $44.50/TB	$959.99 — $43.64/TB	$1,035.00 — $43.12/TB

Four of the six capacity steps lower cost per terabyte. Two raise it. WD Red Pro improves from 20TB to 22TB then gets worse at 24TB. Seagate gets worse at 22TB and recovers at 24TB. Toshiba falls at both steps.

The “buy the biggest drive, it’s cheaper per TB” rule of thumb is wrong often enough to be worth thirty seconds with a calculator. Six drives from this grid runs $4,752 to $6,360, so a step in the wrong direction is real money.

Search NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Prices move. Check before you buy six of anything.

Before you order six of anything, know what they sound like: Exos are loud, and the chassis panel is the real noise.

The rebuild floor

Take the most generous possible assumption — the drive sustains its rated maximum across the whole platter, the replacement is empty, nothing else is using the NAS — and a full copy still takes this long:

24TB model	Rated max	Full-copy floor
Seagate Exos X24 ST24000NM002H	285 MB/s	23.4 hours
WD Red Pro WD241KFGX	287 MB/s	23.2 hours
Toshiba MG11ACA24TE	295 MiB/s	21.6 hours

Rates from the Seagate Exos X24 manual, the WD Red Pro data sheet, and the Toshiba MG11 overview.

You will not hit those numbers. TrueNAS’s dRAID primer explains why: a traditional RAIDZ resilver reads every surviving disk at once and chases scattered blocks, which turns much of the job into random I/O rather than the clean sequential streaming the spec sheet describes. Add parity work, whatever else the NAS is serving, and how full the pool is.

Six-wide at 24TB means reading up to 120TB and writing 24TB — 144TB of device traffic through one rebuild. Plan for a day. The three drives are close enough on paper that none of them buys you a meaningfully shorter window.

The URE calculation is the wrong reason to pick RAIDZ2

You will see this argument everywhere, so it is worth dismantling properly.

All three current 24TB drives are rated around one unrecoverable sector per 10^15 bits. The famous calculation treats that as an independent per-bit probability:

P(at least one error) ≈ 1 − exp(−B/q)

Five full 24TB survivors hold 960 trillion bits. At q = 10^15 that returns 61.7%. Using the older consumer-grade 10^14 figure returns 99.99% — which is where “RAID 5 is dead” came from.

The arithmetic is fine. The assumption underneath it is not. A qualification limit is a bound the manufacturer guarantees, not a claim that every bit is an identical coin flip at exactly that rate.

The field data disagrees with the model directly. Bairavasundaram et al. studied 1.5 million drives over 32 months (FAST/SIGMETRICS, 2007) and found latent sector errors in 3.45% of nearline drives and 1.46% of enterprise drives — with strong temporal and spatial clustering, and five of eighteen drive families recording none at all. Errors bunch up in particular drives and particular families. They do not sprinkle themselves evenly across your array.

That study does not prove RAIDZ1 is safe. It proves 61.7% is not a real prediction about your rebuild.

So pick redundancy on structure, not on that percentage — which lands you in the same place for a better reason.

What to actually build

OpenZFS gives RAIDZ1 one device of fault tolerance and RAIDZ2 two. With six 24TB drives:

Layout	Usable	After one failure
RAIDZ1	120TB	no margin for ~a day
RAIDZ2	96TB	still protected against a second failure
3 × mirrors	72TB	protected — unless it’s the other half of that pair

Build one six-wide RAIDZ2 vdev. You give up 24TB to keep one device of fault tolerance through a copy job whose floor is already 21 hours. That is the entire argument, and it does not need the disputed percentage to work.

Choose three mirrored pairs instead if you want faster random I/O, want to expand two drives at a time, and would rather a rebuild read one disk than five. The sharp edge: lose both members of one pair and the pool is gone while four healthy drives watch.

Do not build six-wide RAIDZ1 at these capacities for anything you cannot restore from somewhere else. It saves one drive and spends every bit of your failure margin during the longest maintenance window the array will ever have.

The NAS capacity calculator runs the same parity maths for other drive counts and sizes.

Buy the Exos X24

Six Seagate Exos X24 24TB in one RAIDZ2 vdev. $5,688 for 96TB usable.

It is the cheapest 24TB drive in the class at $39.50/TB — $112 a drive under the WD Red Pro, which is $672 more across six bays for a disk that rebuilds no faster. Exos is also the cheapest option at 20TB, so if you want a smaller pool the answer does not change: six 20TB Exos at $791.99 is $4,752 for 80TB usable.

The rebuild argument does not separate these drives — 23.4 hours against 23.2 and 21.6 is noise once parity and live traffic are in play. So the money decides, and the money is not close.

Two things that would change the pick. If your enclosure’s compatibility list names Red Pro and not Exos, follow the list — a supported drive beats a cheaper one. And if you are buying into an existing pool, match what is already in the bays rather than mixing families.

RAIDZ2 survives a drive dying. It does not survive you deleting the wrong directory — keep a backup somewhere else.

Size a Frigate NVR by Bitrate, Not Megapixels

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-07 · St. Louis County, MO

Reolink’s RLC-520A is a 5MP camera. Its RLC-811A is 4K — 3840×2160 against the 520A’s 2560×1920, about seventy percent more pixels. Reolink’s own spec pages give both the same mainstream default: 6144 kbps.

Same default, same file size, same drive. The megapixel number on the box predicts nothing about your storage bill.

This page is about picking the right input. For which machine to buy once you have the number, see best hardware for Frigate NVR.

Frigate copies the stream, so the camera sets the size

Frigate’s recording documentation states that recordings are “written directly from your camera stream without re-encoding.” Nothing in Frigate compresses your footage. Whatever bitrate the camera emits is what lands on the disk, byte for byte.

That collapses the whole storage question to one multiplication. One megabit per second of continuous recording is 86,400 megabits a day, which is 10.8 GB/day. Everything else — resolution, frame rate, codec — matters only because it moves the bitrate.

Here is the Reolink mainstream range, converted:

Mainstream bitrate	Per camera/day	4 cameras, 14 days	4 cameras, 30 days
1024 kbps (RLC-520A floor)	11.1 GB	0.62 TB	1.33 TB
2048 kbps	22.1 GB	1.24 TB	2.65 TB
4096 kbps (RLC-811A floor)	44.2 GB	2.48 TB	5.31 TB
6144 kbps (both defaults)	66.4 GB	3.72 TB	7.96 TB
8192 kbps (both ceilings)	88.5 GB	4.95 TB	10.62 TB

Bitrate ranges from the Reolink RLC-520A and RLC-811A specification pages, read 2026-09-07. Continuous recording, decimal gigabytes.

Read the two ends of that column. The setting inside one camera moves your storage by a factor of eight. The megapixel step between the two cameras moves it by zero. You are shopping the wrong variable.

Reolink’s substreams are capped at 512 kbps against the mainstream’s 8192 kbps, per its bandwidth support article — a sixteen-fold gap that matters later.

Put your own cameras’ numbers into the Frigate NVR storage calculator. It takes a known bitrate directly.

What megapixels actually cost: the detect stream

Resolution is not free. It just does not bill you where people look.

Frigate’s camera setup guide describes the detect stream as “the only stream that Frigate will decode for processing,” and the record stream as “the resolution you wish to store for reference.” Two different streams, two different budgets. The 4K stream goes to disk untouched. The substream is what gets decoded, buffered and inspected.

You can see the split cleanly in shared memory. Frigate’s installation docs give a per-camera minimum of (width × height × 1.5 × 20 + 270480) / 1048576 MB, computed on the detect resolution, plus up to 40 MB for logs:

Detect resolution	Per camera	4 cameras + logs
640×480	9.05 MB	76 MB
1280×720	26.63 MB	147 MB
1920×1080	59.58 MB	278 MB
2560×1440	105.73 MB	463 MB
3840×2160	237.56 MB	990 MB

Frigate’s own worked example prints 66.63 MB for a single 1280×720 camera including logs, which is 26.63 plus the 40 MB log allowance — the arithmetic above reproduces it exactly.

Detecting at 4K costs nearly nine times the shared memory of detecting at 720p. Recording at 4K costs none of it. Run a 1280×720 detect substream and record the main stream at whatever resolution you paid for. Frigate’s guide asks that the detect and record streams share an aspect ratio, for the sake of its UI.

The detector budget is frames, not cameras

The third budget is inference, and Frigate publishes the arithmetic for it. From the recommended hardware page: “With an inference speed of 10, your Coral will top out at 1000/10=100, or 100 frames per second.”

So a detector’s ceiling is 1000 divided by its inference time in milliseconds, and your demand is camera count times detect frame rate. Frigate’s camera guide recommends 5 fps for detection, rising toward 10 fps only for very fast-moving objects. At 5 fps, a detector rated 100 fps covers twenty cameras’ worth of detection in the worst case where every camera is triggering at once — and Frigate gates object detection behind motion detection, so the realistic load sits well under that.

Detect frame rate is the lever here. Record resolution appears nowhere in it.

Frigate’s object detector docs note that “when using many cameras one detector may not be enough to keep up” and that “multiple detectors can be defined assuming GPU resources are available.” If your arithmetic lands close to the ceiling, that is the escape hatch — not a bigger drive.

The fourth budget is watts

Cameras draw power, and the megapixel number predicts that no better than it predicts storage.

Reolink lists the fixed 4K RLC-811A at “<12W” on “IEEE 802.3af, 48V active.” The 4K RLC-823A PTZ is listed at “DC 12.0V⎓2A, <24W” and requires “IEEE 802.3at.” Identical resolution, identical 6144 kbps default, double the power class.

Six fixed cameras plus two PTZs is roughly 120 W of rated device draw before cable loss and headroom. Plenty of eight-port PoE switches do not supply that, because “eight PoE ports” describes connectors rather than a power budget. Add the rated watts, add the run length, add a margin, and buy on the total — the PoE budget calculator does exactly that.

Getting your real number off the camera

Reolink’s support article says to open Settings → Stream and click Maximum Bitrate. Every other vendor has the equivalent screen. That number, not the marketing resolution, is your sizing input.

What the number means depends on the control mode, and Axis’s bitrate control white paper is the clearest published account of the difference. Variable bitrate has the benefit of “constant, uncompromised video quality,” but its drawback is that storage needs “may be unpredictable,” because “motion or other events in the scene can cause the stream size and bitrate to increase significantly.” Maximum bitrate “guarantees that the bitrate stays below a set limit regardless of video scene complexity” — by compressing harder, “with no consideration of the effects on image quality.”

Set a maximum bitrate. An NVR that overruns its disk in week three is a worse outcome than a busy frame that softens, and a cap makes the storage calculation deterministic instead of a guess about how much your driveway moves.

Codec is the other lever, and it is a real one. Catellier and Pinson’s subjective study for NTIA/ITS describes H.265/HEVC as “developed to be roughly twice as efficient as H.264/AVC — meaning H.265/HEVC could deliver the same quality as H.264/AVC using roughly half the bitrate.” The RLC-811A lists “H.264, H.265”; the older RLC-520A lists H.264 only. At a shared 6144 kbps default, the H.265 camera is the one giving you more picture for the same disk.

Axis makes the same point commercially with Zipstream, which it says “lowers bandwidth and storage requirements by an average of 50% or more when compared to standard compression” by adapting “based on scene motion, scene content, ambient light level, and settings.” Note what is missing from that list: resolution. Axis ships it on cameras as ordinary as the 1080p P3265-LVE.

Where a bitrate table stops working

Equal bitrate is not equal quality. In the same NTIA study, “for all 20 scenes coded with H.265/HEVC at 4 Mbps mean opinion scores span 38% of the subjective scale, which indicates the importance of scene selection.” Nearly two fifths of the quality range, at one fixed bitrate, purely from what was in front of the lens.

So the storage arithmetic transfers between installations and the quality does not. A quiet indoor hallway at 4096 kbps and a wind-blown tree line at 4096 kbps write the same gigabytes and look nothing alike. Set the cap, record for two days, look at your own worst camera, and adjust that one. Do not adjust all of them because one scene is busy.

Buy the 10TB SkyHawk AI and cap the cameras at 4096 kbps

Four 4K cameras, continuous, 30 days retained, capped at 4096 kbps: 5.31 TB. Left at the 6144 kbps default: 7.96 TB, which does not fit an 8TB drive with any usable headroom.

That is the whole buying decision, and it is a camera setting rather than a hardware problem.

Drive	Feed price	4-cam 30-day fit at 4096 kbps
Seagate SkyHawk 4TB (ST4000VX007)	$220.00	No — covers 14 days at 6144 kbps and little else
Seagate SkyHawk 8TB (model not named in the listing)	$400.00	Yes, 66% full
Seagate SkyHawk AI 10TB (ST10000VE001)	$450.00	Yes, 53% full — and covers the 6144 kbps default too

The 10TB is the pick. It absorbs the 6144 kbps default without a resize, leaves room for a fifth camera, and in this feed it undercuts the model-named 8TB SkyHawk row (ST8000VX004, $514.10 ) by $64.10 for two extra terabytes. Buy the 4TB only for a 14-day motion-only build.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Those prices come from a feed deposited 2026-08-17 and drive pricing moves weekly. Open the link before you spend anything.

Do not buy a bigger NVR box because you bought 4K cameras. Storage is set by the bitrate cap, detection runs on a 720p substream, and shared memory follows the substream too. The 4K upgrade is close to free on the Frigate machine — what it costs you is camera price and, if you raise the cap to make 4K look like 4K, disk. Which box to buy is settled in best hardware for Frigate NVR, and the drive class question in best NAS hard drives.

The four numbers, in order

Bitrate cap per camera, from the camera’s own stream page. Multiply by 10.8 GB per Mbps per day, then by retention. → storage calculator
Detect substream resolution, 1280×720 unless objects are genuinely tiny. Run Frigate’s shm formula on it.
Detect frame rate, 5 fps, times camera count, against 1000 ÷ your detector’s inference milliseconds.
Rated watts per camera, summed, plus cable loss and headroom. → PoE budget calculator

None of those four takes megapixels as an input. That is the point.

Sources

Frigate documentation, opened 2026-09-07: recording (streams written without re-encoding), camera setup (detect is the only decoded stream), installation (shm formula and worked example), recommended hardware (inference-speed arithmetic), planning a new installation, motion detection, object detectors
Reolink specification pages, opened 2026-09-07: RLC-520A, RLC-811A, RLC-823A, and the bandwidth and finding your bitrate support articles
Axis Communications white papers: bitrate control for IP video, Zipstream technology; product specifications for the AXIS P3265-LVE
A. A. Catellier and M. H. Pinson, Characterization of the HEVC Coding Efficiency Advance Using 20 Scenes, ITU-T Rec. P.913 Compliant Subjective Methods, VQM, and PSNR, NTIA/ITS, December 2015
Drive prices: Newegg product feed via Rakuten (MID 44583), deposited 2026-08-17, lowest in-stock USD row per listing

Synology or Build? The Five-Year NAS Cost

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A four-bay Synology and a four-bay box you assemble yourself both sit in a cupboard drawing power every hour for five years. Everyone assumes the DIY one is cheaper to run and that the electricity is where the appliance premium comes back. Neither half of that is true.

The NAS operating system comparison ends by saying all four appliances are wrong if what you want is a machine you administer yourself. This page is that purchase, costed: what does five years of each actually take out of your account, drives excluded?

The five-year number

Drives are excluded from every row because they are the same purchase either way — four 8TB NAS drives cost what they cost whichever box they go in. What is left is the enclosure, the memory, a boot device where one is needed, the operating system, and sixty months of electricity.

Five years, drives excluded	Hardware	Electricity	Total
Synology DS925+, DSM	$889.99	$226	$1,116
AOOSTAR WTR Pro 5825U, TrueNAS	$598.98	$169–$193	$768–$792
Same build, Unraid Lifetime	$847.98	$169–$193	$1,017–$1,041
Same build, Unraid Starter	$647.98	$169–$193	$817–$841

The DIY build is $323 to $347 cheaper across five years, and electricity accounts for $32 to $56 of that. Roughly a tenth. The rest is the box price and the fact that DSM is included while an Unraid licence is not.

Buy the most expensive Unraid tier and the DIY route still finishes $74 to $98 ahead. That is the whole electricity argument, resolved: it is a rounding error against a $291 difference in sticker price.

What the boxes actually draw

These are NAS Compares’ measurements, taken with the drives installed and the array built:

Machine	Measured idle	Measured load	Five years at idle
Synology DS925+	~28W	62–64W	$226
AOOSTAR WTR Pro (Ryzen 7 5825U)	21–24W	64–66W	$169–$193
Topton MW-N100-NAS ITX board	28.2W	55W peak	$227
Topton MW-N305-NAS ITX board	27–28W	64–66W	$218–$226

Rob Andrews at NAS Compares recorded the DS925+ at “approximately 28 watts” in a fully idle state, base apps installed and the system not being accessed, rising to 62–64W with all four bays filled, SSDs in, the CPU under strain and both 2.5GbE connections active (review, 2 May 2025). The WTR Pro review of 11 September 2024 gives “an average of 21-24W when the drives and system were in Idle”, and 64–66W with the drives being read and the CPU at 40–50%. The array in that review was four Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives in a one-disk-redundancy ZFS pool under Unraid, stated in the throughput section rather than beside the idle figure.

Note what the load column does. Under actual work the appliance and the DIY box land within two watts of each other. The idle spread is the entire difference, and the idle spread is worth $6 to $11 a year.

Building your own does not lower the idle draw

This is the part that gets assumed and is wrong often enough to cost people money.

The same reviewer, same method, measured the Topton MW-N100-NAS — the six-SATA, 10GbE ITX board a parts-built four-bay usually starts from — at “around 28.2W with drives connected.” That is the Synology’s figure to a tenth of a watt, from a board whose CPU carries a 6W TDP. The N305 version of the same board recorded “idle power consumption of just 27-28 watts with six connected drives in hibernation” — with the drives parked, which should have been the best case.

A 6W processor does not produce a 6W machine. The SATA controller, three network interfaces and the board’s own power delivery set the floor, and on these boards the floor is high. If low idle is the goal, the board is the wrong place to look for it. The laptop-class SoC in the AOOSTAR box is what buys the 21W, not the fact that you assembled it.

Our idle power reference for homelab hardware has the wider device-by-device table if you are budgeting a whole rack rather than one NAS.

The setting that beats both boxes

Synology publishes its own numbers, and they disagree with the measured one in a way worth understanding rather than averaging.

The DS925+ product specification, last updated 6 August 2026, lists 37.91 watts (Access) and 12.33 watts (HDD Hibernation). NAS Compares measured 28W. None of these three contradicts the others, because they describe three different machines-in-a-moment: drives spinning and being read, drives spun up but nothing being served, drives parked.

Priced over five years at $0.184/kWh:

DS925+ state	Watts	Five years
Access (Synology, published)	37.91	$306
Fully idle (NAS Compares, measured)	~28	$226
HDD hibernation (Synology, published)	12.33	$99

That $206 swing on one machine is between three and a half and six times the $32-to-$56 gap between the two machines. Whether your drives get to park matters more than which enclosure you bought, and it is the only power lever on this page big enough to notice.

It is also the lever most people never pull. Anything that touches the array on a timer — a surveillance recorder, a container writing logs, a backup client polling every few minutes, a media server refreshing metadata — wakes the drives and keeps them awake. Hibernation is a real setting and mostly a theoretical saving. Assume the 28W figure, run the numbers in the power cost calculator against your own utility rate, and treat anything better as a bonus.

What the $291 buys, and what it does not

The gap in the hardware column is $889.99 against $379.00 for the AOOSTAR barebone, plus $129.99 for a 16GB DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM and $89.99 for a boot NVMe the Synology does not need, since DSM installs onto the array.

For that $291 you get DSM, a three-year warranty you can extend to five by buying an extension, and a support line. You do not get more hardware. The DS925+ ships 4GB of DDR4 ECC against the DIY box’s 16GB, an embedded Ryzen V1500B against a Ryzen 7 5825U, and two 2.5GbE ports against two 2.5GbE ports.

Three constraints ride along with the appliance, all of them from Synology’s own documents:

M.2 is still closed. The DSM 7.3 announcement of 8 October 2025 reopened third-party drives for storage pools on 25 model year units, and its footnote reads: “Creation of M.2 based storage pool and cache still requires drives on the HCL.” The specification sheet says the same. A Synology SNV3410-400G listed at $474.99 on Newegg on 7 September 2026; a 512GB ADATA Legend 710 you cannot use for that pool listed at $89.99 in the August feed.
Memory expansion is conditioned. The DS925+ specification states Synology “will not provide complete product warranty or technical support if non-Synology memory modules are used for memory expansion.” Going past 4GB means buying their module or accepting that.
No hardware transcoding, at all. The specification sheet lists no video transcoding section for the DS925+, and none for the cheaper DS425+ either. The drive policy got walked back in a point release. This one did not, and it is the change on the 2025 Plus line that deserved the attention the drive policy got. If transcoding is why you are shopping, the NAS transcoding guide sorts the field by that spec alone.

Synology-branded drives cost real money over the equivalent Exos for no benefit I can identify. That was the drives. The M.2 price above is the same policy, still in force.

Build it and run TrueNAS

Buy the AOOSTAR WTR Pro 5825U barebone, a 16GB DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM and a cheap boot NVMe, and put TrueNAS on it. That is $598.98 in hardware, nothing for the operating system, and $169 to $193 of electricity over five years. It gives you four times the memory, a genuinely faster processor, ZFS checksumming instead of Btrfs on a locked appliance, any NVMe you like in the M.2 slots, and a machine you can repurpose when your storage needs change.

Open aoostar pageLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Pay for Unraid instead of TrueNAS if your drives are mismatched sizes and you want to add one at a time — $49 Starter caps at six storage devices with one year of updates, $249 Lifetime is unlimited devices and updates forever. Even the expensive tier keeps the DIY route ahead on five-year cost. It just stops being the obvious call.

The budget NAS build guide has the full parts list, the recertified-drive route, and what the memory shortage did to every line of it.

Buy the DS925+ if DSM is the product

Synology still makes the best NAS operating system. Not the hardware. Not the drive list. The software, which is what you are still using at month eight.

Buy the DS925+ if you want an appliance that works the day it arrives, an app catalogue that does not run out, and a phone number when it breaks. You are paying $291 up front and $6 to $11 a year more in electricity for exactly that, and it is a defensible purchase — it is just not a cheaper one, and no power calculation is going to make it one.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

The cheaper door into DSM is the DS425+ at $599.99 — within a dollar of the DIY build’s hardware total, and Synology’s sheet for it lists a Celeron J4125, 2GB of non-ECC memory and no transcoding section. It closes the price gap by giving up the hardware.

Prices move, the memory market in 2026 moves weekly, and two of these listings carry marketplace sellers. Read the seller name before the price.

Wrong for

The DIY build is wrong if you want an app catalogue rather than a compose file, if nobody in the house can restore a pool at 11pm, or if you were counting on a support contract.

The DS925+ is wrong if you need hardware transcoding, if you want a third-party NVMe cache, or if you are buying it because someone told you the appliance pays for itself in electricity. It does not. At the measured wattages it costs $6 to $11 a year more to run than the box it is already more expensive than.

Both are wrong if you are choosing on power alone. Across every machine on this page the five-year electricity spread is $169 to $227 — under sixty dollars end to end. Choose on the software, the drive policy and the sticker, then set your utility rate in the power calculator and stop thinking about it.

Sources

NAS Compares — Synology DS925+ NAS Review, 2 May 2025 — measured idle and load draw, noise, thermals
NAS Compares — Aoostar WTR Pro NAS Review, 11 Sep 2024 — measured idle and load draw with four IronWolf 4TB drives
NAS Compares — Topton MW-N100-NAS motherboard review (14 Nov 2024, updated 4 Dec 2024) and MW-N305-NAS review, 4 Dec 2024 — measured ITX board idle draw
Synology DS925+ specifications and the product specification PDF, last updated 6 Aug 2026 — published wattages, memory and M.2 conditions, warranty
Synology DS425+ specifications — Celeron J4125, 2GB non-ECC, no transcoding section
Synology DSM 7.3 announcement, 8 Oct 2025 — third-party drive reversal and the surviving M.2 HCL footnote
AOOSTAR WTR PRO 5825U product page — barebone price, DDR4-3200 memory support, package contents
Unraid pricing — the one-time licence tiers, device caps and update terms
EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3 — 18.44 cents/kWh, May 2026 US residential average

Email corrections to hello@techfuelhq.com.

UniFi vs an OPNsense Build: The IDS/IPS Ceiling

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Turning on threat management costs you throughput. Ubiquiti publishes how much. It just does not print the number anywhere near the toggle.

That is the thing to understand before you buy UniFi, and it is the reason I would build instead. I have run both an appliance and a box I put together myself, and the appliance is the one where a spec you did not read becomes your internet speed.

The ceiling is published, one page away

Ubiquiti’s own help page for intrusion detection is direct about the cost. Enabling it “increases CPU and memory utilization,” and “since traffic is being actively inspected, maximum routing performance may be reduced” — then it sends you to techspecs.ui.com for the figure (Ubiquiti Help Center). The setup steps on that same page walk you to Settings, CyberSecure, Protection, and a switch. No number.

Here is what is on the other site. These are the gateways worth cross-shopping rather than the whole catalogue — every figure is Ubiquiti’s published spec for that model, and every price is from Ubiquiti’s store:

Gateway	Default WAN ports	IDS/IPS throughput	Store price
Cloud Gateway Ultra (UCG-Ultra)	2.5 GbE RJ45	1 Gbps	$129
Cloud Gateway Max (UCG-Max)	2.5 GbE RJ45	2.3 Gbps	from $199
UniFi Express 7 (UX7)	10 GbE RJ45	2.3 Gbps	from $199
Dream Router 7 (UDR7)	10G SFP+, 2.5 GbE RJ45	2.3 Gbps	$279
Cloud Gateway Fiber (UCG-Fiber)	10G SFP+, 10 GbE RJ45	5 Gbps	$279
Dream Machine Pro (UDM-Pro)	10G SFP+, 1 GbE RJ45	3.5 Gbps	$379
Dream Machine SE (UDM-SE)	10G SFP+, 2.5 GbE RJ45	3.5 Gbps	$499
Dream Machine Pro Max (UDM-Pro-Max)	10G SFP+, 2.5 GbE RJ45	5 Gbps	$599
Dream Machine Beast (UDM-Beast)	25G SFP28, 10 GbE RJ45	25 Gbps	$1,499
Enterprise Firewall (EFG)	25G SFP28, 2.5 GbE RJ45	12.5 Gbps	$1,999

Read the first two columns against each other. A UniFi Express 7 has a 10 GbE WAN port and inspects at 2.3 Gbps. A Cloud Gateway Ultra has a 2.5 GbE WAN port and inspects at 1 Gbps. The port tells you what the gateway will accept. The other column tells you what it will actually move once you switch on the feature you bought a security appliance for.

The pricing does not climb with it either. The $279 Cloud Gateway Fiber inspects at 5 Gbps — faster than the $379 Dream Machine Pro at 3.5, and level with the $599 Dream Machine Pro Max. If inspection speed is what you are shopping for, the model order on the store page is not the order you want.

Multi-gig is where you find out by accident

At 1 Gbps almost nothing here bites. Most of the line-up inspects at or above a gigabit, threat management goes on, the speed test looks the same, and you never think about it again.

Then the fiber gets upgraded. Two gig, five gig, whatever the ISP is selling this year. The gateway is fine — it has the ports. What happens is that your speed test stops matching your bill, and the reason is a specification on a different website that you had no reason to open when you were choosing between a Dream Router and a Dream Machine.

This is a quiet failure. Nothing errors. Nothing alerts. You get the inspection ceiling and a vague sense that the ISP is overselling.

If you are on multi-gig and you want IPS on, the inspection number is the only spec that matters. Pick the gateway from that column and work backwards.

Rule granularity is the second limit

The other thing an appliance costs you is control. Current UniFi has moved on this, so here is where it stands.

UniFi Network 9.0 brought zone-based firewalling, and it is a real firewall. Custom zones on top of the built-in six, to a ceiling of thirty zones in total, policies matched on device, network, IP, MAC, port, application, domain or region, plus protocol, connection state, scheduling and rule reordering (Ubiquiti Help Center). That is a long way past what UniFi gateways used to hand you.

What has not changed is that the shape is fixed. The six built-in zones carry a lock icon and cannot be removed. The built-in policies carry the same lock and “cannot be modified or removed” — you write a policy above one to beat it rather than editing it. A network belongs to exactly one zone.

That is a different arrangement from a pf-based ruleset, where nothing is implicit and every default is yours to set. On OPNsense the ruleset is the whole story; on UniFi there is a layer underneath your rules that you override rather than own. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether you have ever needed to change something in that layer. If you have, you already know. If you have not, the zone matrix is easier to reason about than a page of interface rules.

Why a new build starts on OPNsense

Both are FreeBSD, both filter well, and my OPNsense versus pfSense comparison settles the feature-by-feature version. My reason for starting new work on OPNsense is about Netgate rather than about packet filtering.

The licensing. Netgate discontinued the free Home+Lab download of pfSense Plus, saying the decision “was made in order to align Netgate’s business model to better serve our worldwide customer base and partners,” and citing appliance vendors reselling boxes with the free commercial build on them (Netgate, October 26, 2023). pfSense Plus on hardware you supply now starts at $129 a year. pfSense CE stayed free, and stayed good — this is a direction, not a cliff.

The WireGuard episode. Netgate shipped a kernel-mode WireGuard implementation, quality concerns surfaced, and it came back out: “Given that kernel-mode WireGuard has been removed from FreeBSD, and out of an abundance of caution, we are removing WireGuard from pfSense software pending a thorough review and audit” (Netgate, March 18, 2021). It returned later as a package. The handling is the part I remember.

The domain. In 2017 a WIPO panel ordered opnsense.com transferred away from Jamie Thompson of Rubicon Communications dba Netgate, to OPNsense’s maintainer Deciso — “the Panel orders that the disputed domain name <opnsense.com> be transferred to the Complainant” (WIPO case D2017-1828, November 12, 2017).

None of that makes pfSense a bad firewall. It is why, given a blank machine, I start somewhere else.

Realtek is the DIY instability

Almost every “my OPNsense box randomly drops the WAN” story ends at the network card, and the vendors say so in their own documentation.

Netgate’s pfSense hardware documentation: “The best practice is to use Intel NICs because they have solid drivers in FreeBSD and they perform well,” and of the alternatives, “some work fine, others may suffer from instability or poor performance” (pfSense docs). OPNsense’s hardware page lands in the same place: “Intel® network interface cards (NIC) for LAN connections are reliable, fast and not error-prone” (OPNsense docs).

Both platforms sit on FreeBSD, so this is one piece of advice, not two. Use Intel and most of the mystery problems disappear. A cheap box with a Realtek chip is the single most common way a DIY firewall earns its reputation for being flaky, and it is a hardware choice rather than a software one.

Build it, on OPNsense, with Intel NICs

That is the recommendation. Commodity x86, Intel networking, OPNsense on top.

You give up the single pane of glass, and that is a real thing to give up. Someone who has only ever run the appliance usually re-buys the appliance, and having run both I understand exactly why — one interface for the gateway, the switches and the access points is worth something, and a build does not offer it. What you get back is a firewall with no inspection ceiling except the CPU you chose, no locked policy layer under your rules, and no vendor deciding next year what tier your feature lives in. For hardware to put it on, the homelab firewall and router stack comparison has bench numbers by box.

Buy UniFi instead if you want integrated Wi-Fi and switch management in one place. That is the case for it, it is a good case, and it is the whole case. If that is you, buy on the inspection column: pick a gateway whose IDS/IPS figure is above your WAN speed, not one whose ports are.

Do not buy UniFi if you want granular firewall control, or full-rate inspection on a multi-gig line without buying up the stack. Five gigabits of inspection starts at $279, and past that the ladder stops making sense — the $1,999 Enterprise Firewall inspects at 12.5 Gbps while the cheaper $1,499 Dream Machine Beast inspects at 25. On a build, that number is a CPU choice.

Prices and specifications move. Both columns above came off Ubiquiti’s own pages on September 7, 2026 — check them before you order.

Used RTX A6000 vs RTX 5090: The 42.5GB Line

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Forty-two and a half gigabytes. That single number settles most of this purchase, and almost nothing else about either card does.

The exact Llama 3.3 70B Q4_K_M file is 42.52GB of weights. It does not fit on a 32GB RTX 5090. It does not fit across two 16GB cards, because those still add up to 32GB. A 48GB RTX A6000 is the only card in this comparison that holds it — and the A6000 is a 2020 board.

Everything that fits 16GB belongs to the RTX 5080.

The line, and which cards cross it

Card	Memory	Board power	Holds 42.52GB of weights?	Lowest August price
RTX A6000	48GB GDDR6 ECC	300W	Yes — 5.48GB left over	$5,490.00
RTX 5090	32GB GDDR7	575W	No — short by 10.52GB	$4,829.99
RTX 5080	16GB GDDR7	360W	No	$1,399.99

Memory and power figures come from the manufacturer spec tables on the NVIDIA RTX A6000, RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 pages; PNY publishes 768GB/s of bandwidth and a dual-slot active fansink for its A6000 board.

The fit is binary and the price is not. That is the whole shape of this decision: one card clears a hard capacity threshold, two do not, and the cheapest of the three is the one you probably want.

16GB is already fast, which is the awkward part

Our RTX 5080 throughput dataset recorded gpt-oss 20B at MXFP4 decoding 178 to 190 tokens per second across two dated captures, with the whole model sitting in 13,381 to 14,067 MiB of the card’s 16GB. Qwen 2.5 14B at Q4_K_M decoded at 94 to 97 tokens per second. Every cell is the median of three runs, and the published CSV carries the driver version, the Ollama build, the model digests and the resident memory readings.

That result is the reason the 48GB card is not an automatic upgrade. A 20B model and a 14B model are already resident and already quick on a $1,399.99 card. Paying nearly four times that for 48GB buys nothing at all unless the extra capacity changes which model can stay loaded. The VRAM-tier guide maps the full ladder, and the VRAM calculator works out the context-sensitive version of the same question.

Skip the RTX 5090 for 70B work

This is the finding that surprised us. If you are buying a card to reach a 70B model, the RTX 5090 is the worst of the three, and it is not close.

At $4,829.99 it costs $3,430 more than the RTX 5080 — and it stops 10.52GB short of the file that would justify the upgrade. It buys a bigger pool that lands on the wrong side of the threshold this page is about, then asks 575W to do it. Meanwhile the A6000 sits $660 above it and actually clears the line at 300W.

One band does belong to it, and the RTX 5080 cannot take it: a working set between 16GB and 32GB — a 32B model at Q4, say — is too big for 16GB and nowhere near needing 48GB. If that is your workload, the 5090 is the only card in this table that fits it. Nothing here recommends it above that band, and no matched throughput number for it was captured on this page.

Availability made the point again. All three RTX 5090 card rows in the August feed were checked on September 7 and every one had gone out of stock. If you are shopping for a 32GB pool you are paying a scarcity price for capacity that does not reach.

Buy the RTX 5080

Start at $1,399.99 and stop there unless your model genuinely will not fit 16GB.

That is the recommendation for nearly everyone reading this. A 20B model runs at 178 to 190 tokens per second on it by our own measurement, it draws 360W, it is a current-generation card with a current warranty, and it costs less than a third of either 48GB or 32GB alternative.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Thirteen RTX 5080 cards were in stock in the August feed between $1,399.99 and $1,999.99, so there is real room to shop the exact board. Prices move — check before you order.

The one case for going after a used A6000

Buy 48GB when your resident working set lands above 32GB and comfortably below 48GB. That is a narrow window and it is the only window. A dense 70B at Q4 fits it. A 20B does not, and a 120B does not either.

Watch the headroom while you are in there. The weights take 42.52GB and leave 5.48GB for the KV cache and runtime buffers. Ordinary context lengths live in that space; long ones do not, and the failure shows up as an out-of-memory error partway through a session rather than at load time. Work out your context budget before you commit to the card, not after.

Three things the A6000 gives you beyond raw capacity: ECC memory, a 300W ceiling that fits a normal power supply, and a two-slot board in a market where the fast consumer cards have grown to three and four. NVIDIA also supports it on the RTX Enterprise driver branch rather than the Game Ready branch, which is the right trade for a machine that works and the wrong one for a machine that games.

What to make the seller put in writing

A used A6000 is a private-party or reseller transaction, and the coverage rides entirely on that paperwork. PNY publishes a three-year limited warranty on a new card, and NVIDIA’s warranty policy sends most claims to the reseller or board partner first. Neither of those facts follows a card to its second owner on its own. So before you pay, get:

the exact part number and a photo of the serial;
whether the card is used, refurbished, open-box, or pulled from a workstation;
the return window, and who pays return shipping;
the warranty provider and the remaining duration;
enough of that return window left to run a full 48GB memory test and an hour of sustained load.

The fifth one is the one people skip. Run it the day the card arrives.

And know the ceiling. A new PNY board lists at $5,490.00 — $660 above the RTX 5090 and roughly four times the RTX 5080. A used card asking within a few hundred dollars of that is not a deal; the discount is the entire reason to accept a five-year-old GPU with someone else’s hours on it. If you would rather have the new-card warranty than the savings, this is the exact board:

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

How this was checked

The capacity argument uses one exact model artifact rather than a rounded parameter count: the Hugging Face repository reports 42,520,398,816 bytes for Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf, which is 42.52GB. Memory, power and cooling figures were read off the current NVIDIA and PNY specification tables on September 7. Throughput comes from our own RTX 5080 dataset, captured on an RTX 5080 under Ollama with the method and raw CSV published alongside it — no A6000 was benchmarked here, which is why this page recommends the 48GB card on capacity and never on speed.

Prices are the lowest in-stock USD offer per exact model from the August 17 Newegg feed, restricted to actual video cards. No used price appears anywhere on this page: every used-A6000 listing checked on September 7 was expired, dead, or unreachable. That is itself the finding. Used A6000 supply is thin and it moves, so treat any single listing you find as a sample of one and price it against the $5,490.00 new-card ceiling above.

This page is re-checked every six months, and sooner if a new consumer card moves the 32GB ceiling or a major 70B release changes file size.

Which GPU Actually Drives 4K at 240Hz

LK Wood IV — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A 27-inch 4K 240Hz QD-OLED sold for $699.99 in Newegg’s August feed. The panel is no longer the expensive part of this decision. The card is.

The published native 4K ultra averages fall well short of 240 fps. Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 GPU benchmarks hierarchy puts the RTX 5090 — the fastest consumer GPU that exists — at a 110.8 fps geometric mean across eleven raster games at native 4K ultra, and 64.1 fps across its ray-traced suite, on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D testbed with no upscaling or frame generation.

240 is more than double that. For those demanding workloads, the buying question is which card feeds frame generation properly. The cable question is separate.

The cable question is already settled

Start here, because it is the part people spend money on unnecessarily.

4K at 240Hz is a lot of pixels per second. Run it through our DisplayPort and HDMI bandwidth calculator, which derives timing from VESA CVT reduced-blanking v2, and 3840×2160 at 240Hz clocks 2.29 billion pixels per second — about 15% above the raw active-pixel count, because blanking overhead grows with refresh rate rather than staying a flat share.

4K 240Hz mode	Uncompressed	With DSC
10-bit, 4:4:4 (HDR)	68.6 Gbps	18.3 Gbps
8-bit, 4:4:4 (SDR)	54.8 Gbps	18.3 Gbps

Now the links, at their effective rates after encoding overhead:

Interface	Effective	4K 240Hz 10-bit
HDMI 2.0	14.4 Gbps	No — and TMDS has no DSC
DP 1.4 (HBR3)	25.92 Gbps	Needs DSC — then fits easily
DP 2.1 UHBR10	38.69 Gbps	Needs DSC
HDMI 2.1	42.6 Gbps	Needs DSC
DP 2.1 UHBR13.5	52.22 Gbps	Needs DSC
DP 2.1 UHBR20	77.37 Gbps	Fits uncompressed

Read the two columns together and the conclusion is blunt. Exactly one interface carries 4K 240Hz uncompressed, and every other one carries it with DSC — including DisplayPort 1.4, with nearly 30% of its bandwidth still unused. Even 8-bit SDR does not rescue UHBR13.5, which lands 2.6 Gbps short.

The vendors say the same thing in their own specifications. NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 page — a DisplayPort 1.4a card, two generations old — lists a maximum of “4K at 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC, HDR”. NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 pages both list DisplayPort 2.1b with UHBR20 and a maximum of “4K at 480Hz or 8K at 165Hz with DSC” — note that even the newest, widest link on the market reaches its headline number with compression on.

And the monitors agree. Tom’s Hardware’s Alienware AW2725Q review lists the panel as 3840×2160 at 240 Hz, 10-bit, with a single “1x DisplayPort 1.4 w/DSC” and two HDMI 2.1 ports. That is a shipping 4K 240Hz 10-bit monitor whose only DisplayPort input is the old standard.

If you are shopping for a GPU because you think your DisplayPort version cannot feed a 240Hz 4K panel, stop. It can.

What DSC actually costs you, which is the part everyone skips

DSC is not free, but the cost is not where buyers expect.

On image quality, VESA publishes DSC as a fixed 8 bits-per-pixel target — “3:1 (8 bpp)” at 24-bit color and “3.75:1 (8 bpp)” at 30-bit — with “visually lossless compression performance verified by subjective testing”. Almost nobody sees it. Treat that as closed.

The cost is behavioural. Reviewing a 27-inch 4K 240Hz panel with a full-speed DisplayPort 2.1 input, TFTCentral’s Simon Baker listed what UHBR20 lets you avoid in his January 2025 ROG Swift PG27UCDM review: “long delays and black screens when Alt-tabbing out of games, limitations when using multiple displays and daisy chaining, and missing support for features like NVIDIA DSR and DLDSR.”

That last one has a precise rule behind it. NVIDIA told TFTCentral, in a statement Tom’s Hardware reported, that “NVIDIA DSR, NVIDIA DLDSR, and NVIDIA Image Scaling are supported when DSC mode is enabled if the pixel rate needed to drive the display mode does not exceed the GPU’s single head limit. If GPU uses two or more internal heads to drive the display, NVIDIA DSR, NVIDIA DLDSR, and NVIDIA Image Scaling are not supported.” So DSC does not disable downsampling by itself — a mode heavy enough to consume two display heads does.

That is the whole case for UHBR20, and it is a display-behaviour case, not a performance one. ASUS states the PG27UCDM runs “4K at 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz visuals without compression” over DisplayPort 2.1a UHBR20 at 80 Gbps. If alt-tab black screens or a daisy chain matter to you, buy the panel with UHBR20 and pair it with an RTX 50 card. If they do not, DSC is the correct answer and it always was.

One real limit: AMD does not have UHBR20 in the consumer stack. Club386’s report of AMD’s confirmed RX 9070 series specifications lists “HDMI 2.1b DP 2.1a UHBR13.5”, and Sapphire’s Nitro+ RX 9070 XT page confirms DisplayPort 2.1a. RDNA 4 drives 4K 240Hz over DSC like everything else; it cannot drive it uncompressed.

The real gate is frames, and the number to check is not the one you think

Since the link is solved, the whole decision is rendering.

The demanding titles below also fall short of 240 at the review’s 4K settings. TechSpot’s 17-game RTX 5090 suite on a 9800X3D — Steven Walton’s January 2025 review — recorded 195 fps in God of War Ragnarök, 160 fps in Delta Force and 71 fps in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 at 4K. The card’s fastest 4K numbers in that suite came from lighter titles — 212 fps in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, well over 300 in War Thunder — not from the heavy end of it. The card that costs $4,829.99 does not reach 240 in those three demanding games at the tested settings.

For those workloads, Multi Frame Generation is one route to 240, and it has an entry requirement. PCWorld’s Brad Chacos, relaying what his testers reported in the January 2025 RTX 5090 review he co-bylined with Adam Patrick Murray, put it plainly: “you’ll want native in-game frame rates to hit close to 50- to 60fps before turning on MFG, or the latency can start to feel a little weird.” PC Gamer’s Dave James said the same thing about NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 announcement — you need “an RTX 50-series GPU capable enough of delivering at 60 fps in your chosen path-traced game” before the higher frame-gen multipliers do anything but inflate a counter.

The number that decides your purchase is therefore the input rate, not the output rate. And the input rate at 4K with DLSS Quality is not the native-4K figure — DLSS Quality renders internally at roughly 2560×1440 and upscales. Tom’s Hardware’s 1440p column is the closest published stand-in for it. Reading both columns together:

Card	Native 4K raster	Native 4K ray tracing	1440p RT (≈ 4K DLSS-Q input)
RTX 5090	110.8	64.1	100.8
RTX 4090	89.1	52.2	87.7
RTX 5080	77.4	42.1	74.0
RTX 5070 Ti	68.6	36.7	66.2
RX 9070 XT	65.8	30.1	55.5
RTX 5070	54.3	22.7	51.5

Geometric means from Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 hierarchy — 11 raster games, 8 ray-traced, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, no upscaling. The right-hand column is my derivation, not their measurement: it uses their 1440p ray-tracing result as a proxy for the internal render rate of 4K DLSS Quality, which ignores DLSS’s own overhead and is therefore slightly optimistic.

Read that column against the 60 fps floor and the field sorts itself. The RTX 5090, 4090, 5080 and 5070 Ti clear it. The RX 9070 XT falls short at 55.5, and the RTX 5070 is further back still at 51.5.

What each expectation actually buys

Esports and older titles, natively. Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Fortnite and Marvel Rivals sit inside that eleven-game mean alongside Alan Wake II and Black Myth Wukong, which is why the mean lands at 110.8 rather than at either extreme. Competitive shooters are the class of game where a 4K 240Hz panel earns its refresh rate on the card already in the machine — here the display is the constraint and the GPU is not.

AAA raster at 240. Upscaling plus 2× or 4× frame generation, and the input rate is comfortable from the RTX 5070 Ti up (116.8 fps at 1440p raster). This is the largest slice of the real library and it does not need the top of the stack.

Path-traced AAA at 240. The hardest case, and the one the marketing is built on. PCWorld measured Cyberpunk 2077 on the RT Overdrive preset with 1.7× DLSS scaling at 4K on an RTX 5090: 71 fps without frame generation, 249 fps with DLSS 4 MFG. NVIDIA’s own CES 2026 demo, reported by PC Gamer, showed Black Myth Wukong at 246 fps at 4K with path tracing on an RTX 5090 using 6× MFG, at 53 ms of PC latency — that one is a vendor figure from a vendor demo, not an independent measurement. Either way this tier is a 5090 job, or a 5080 with DLSS Quality doing the input work.

Buy the RTX 5080

$1,599.99 for the cheapest card that has margin instead of just enough.

At 4K with DLSS Quality it works out to a 74.0 fps input rate in ray-traced games, clear of the 60 fps floor MFG needs with room left over. The 5070 Ti’s 66.2 is on the line rather than above it. And the 5080’s 77.4 fps native 4K raster average means a large part of what you play never touches frame generation at all.

Check NeweggLink checked 2026-09-07 Search AmazonLink checked 2026-09-07

Buy the RTX 5070 Ti at $979.99 instead if you play raster games and ray tracing is not the point. 116.8 fps at 1440p raster is more input than frame generation needs, and $420 is a monitor.

Do not buy the RTX 5090 for this. $4,829.99 against $1,599.99 — three times the money — for 43% more raster frames and 52% more ray-traced frames. That ratio is defensible if you need native 4K speed or 32GB of VRAM for work. It is not defensible when the target is a refresh rate that frame generation reaches from the 5080.

And do not buy anything at all for the port. If you already own an RTX 40-series card, NVIDIA’s own specification page says it drives 4K at 240Hz over DisplayPort 1.4a with DSC. Buy the monitor, keep the card, and upgrade when the frame rate bothers you rather than when the spec sheet does.

Two things that would change this. If you want an uncompressed signal — because alt-tab blackouts or a daisy chain have burned you before — you need both a UHBR20 monitor and an RTX 50 card, and that combination has a price. And if ray tracing is off the table entirely, the RX 9070 XT is the value play at 65.8 fps native 4K raster, with the caveat that its ray-traced input rate does not clear the frame-generation floor.

Prices are from the August 17, 2026 Newegg feed and graphics cards are moving weekly under the memory shortage. Check the live page before you order.

Where each card sits across every resolution: the GPU hierarchy 2026 tier list. What frame generation is doing to those numbers: frame generation explained. Whether your exact resolution, refresh and color depth fits a given cable: the DisplayPort and HDMI bandwidth calculator.

Steam Content File Locked: Find the Cause and Fix It (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-05 · Updated 2026-09-05 · ~9 min read · St. Louis County, MO

TL;DR · Fix Content File Locked

Diagnose first: use Microsoft Process Explorer and search the game folder name under Find > Find Handle or DLL.
If a process owns the file: close that process. A game that never finished exiting is the first cause to check.
If no process owns it: restart Windows, then use Steam's Clear Download Cache, Repair Folder, and Verify integrity of game files controls.
Do not start with Winsock: it resets network catalog settings. It does not release a local file handle.

What the error means

“An error occurred while updating game (content file locked)” means Steam could not write or replace a required game file because something else still held it open. The shorter “update failed: content file locked” message describes the same blocked write. Same failure, shorter wording. The useful question is not which six generic fixes exist. It is which process owns the file right now. When no live handle appears, move outward to the library folder, its permissions, and Steam’s download state.

Find what is holding the file

Start with Microsoft Sysinternals Process Explorer. Microsoft describes it as the tool for finding which program has a file or directory open. Its download is a portable executable, so there is no installer to work through.

Exit the game and Steam normally.
Run procexp.exe.
Open Find > Find Handle or DLL.
Search for the game’s folder name exactly as it appears under steamapps\common (open that folder first if you are not sure of the spelling).
Read the matching path and owning process in the results.

Do not end an unfamiliar Windows process just because its name appears; if the result belongs to the game, its launcher, Steam, an anti-cheat component, or security software you recognize, close that application through its own interface and search again, because the lock is cleared only when the matching handle disappears. I would not clear a cache before doing this search. Cache repair can change Steam’s state, but it cannot tell you whether the game executable is still alive. Process Explorer turns a vague message into a named owner.

The evidence order stays simple: handle first, Steam state second, network repair always last.

Ranked causes

The game did not close fully. The Steam Community guide “Content File Locked Error Resolved”, posted by アンジェル on April 4, 2024, describes a game process remaining in Task Manager after the player quit. Windows protects an in-use file in the same practical way it protects an open document. This is the first cause to check because Process Explorer can confirm it directly.
An anti-cheat or security process owns the file. A Path of Exile forum thread from December 2024 says Riot Vanguard was active during an update and blocked it; Vanguard appears there as a community report, not a TechFuelHQ measurement. A Reddit r/Steam answer, which I am not linking, describes anti-cheat or another background process still running after the game closes. Treat the process name and matching handle as the evidence; do not disable protection on a guess. If the owner is anti-cheat, close the game and its launcher, then use the steps in the Easy Anti-Cheat error guide if that service itself will not exit cleanly.
The folder is read-only or Steam lacks write permission. An r/iRacing community report describes the game folder becoming read-only after an update. That is a report, not a universal Steam behavior. Check the attribute only after Process Explorer shows no owner. A one-time elevated run can then separate a permission problem from a persistent lock.
The Steam library or download state needs repair. Steam exposes separate controls for download cache, storage-folder repair, and installed-file verification. Use the control that matches the failure. Do not run all three at once; you lose the chance to learn which layer was broken.
A Linux move between drives is hitting a Steam client bug. ValveSoftware’s open Linux issue records a move that appears to proceed, throws the lock error, and reverts. This is distinct from a Windows process holding a local file during a normal update.

Fix the cause you found

Close the owner, then restart Windows

If Process Explorer names a leftover game or launcher process, close it and search again. If it will not release the handle, use Restart from the Windows power menu. The Steam Community guide specifically says to restart rather than shut down. Restart gives Steam a clean session without leaving the stale game process alive.

Open Steam after Windows returns and retry the update. Stop here if it works. The lock had an owner, and you removed it.

Clear Steam’s download cache

Use the Steam client’s own path: Steam > Settings > Downloads > Clear Download Cache. Steam will ask you to confirm, then you can sign in again and retry the update; the April 2024 Steam Community guide also recommends deleting the download cache before verifying the game again, which is why verification follows this step instead of running beside it.

This step fits a download that keeps returning to the same failed state after no file owner remains. It is not a substitute for closing an active process. I would use it after the handle search and restart, not before them.

Repair the Steam library folder

Open Steam > Settings > Storage, select the drive that contains the game, open its drive menu, and choose Repair Folder. This is the current Steam-client storage path. The Steam Community guide also directs readers to select the affected drive in Steam’s Storage settings and repair the folder.

Repair Folder targets the library rather than one title. Use it when more than one update on the same drive fails, or when the one-time administrator test points toward folder permissions. Let the repair finish before starting another update.

Verify the game’s installed files

In Library, right-click the game and choose Properties > Installed Files > Verify integrity of game files. The Steam Community guide documents the same verification function under the older Local Files label. Steam’s current client calls the section Installed Files.

Verification checks the title’s installed content and replaces files that do not match. Run it after the live handle is gone. If verification itself returns Content File Locked, repeat the Process Explorer search while the failure is fresh; the new result may expose the owner that was absent earlier.

For repeated crashes after the update succeeds, move to the separate games keep crashing on PC guide. A crash and a blocked updater are different functions, even when they affect the same game.

Run Steam as administrator once

Exit Steam. Right-click its shortcut and choose Run as administrator, accept the Windows prompt, then retry the update once. This is a permission test. A successful elevated update points back to write access on the Steam library; it does not justify running the client elevated forever.

Close Steam after the test and open it normally. If the elevated run succeeded, the library’s write permissions were the problem, so repair the library through the Repair Folder step above rather than living with an elevated client. If elevation changes nothing, keep looking for a handle or a read-only folder instead of repeating it.

Check the game folder’s read-only attribute

Open the game’s folder, right-click it, choose Properties, and inspect Read-only. Clear the box, apply the change to the folder and its contents, then retry once. This step comes from the r/iRacing community report noted above; TechFuelHQ has not measured it across Steam libraries.

If the attribute returns immediately, stop toggling it. Search for the owning process again and repair the library folder through Steam. A setting that will not stay changed is evidence that the underlying owner or permission state remains.

When `netsh winsock reset` is relevant

Open Windows Terminal (Admin) or Command Prompt (Admin) and run:

netsh winsock reset

Microsoft’s netsh winsock reference says reset returns the Winsock catalog to a clean state and removes custom Layered Service Providers that can cause network trouble. It does not change Winsock Name Space Provider entries.

That makes this a network repair, not a command that releases a file handle. It cannot close the handle Process Explorer found. Keep that distinction clear. Use it only when the lock is network-side: no local owner appears, Steam also has connection or download failures, and the cache, library, and installed files are not the point of failure. Run the command once from an elevated prompt, reopen Steam, and test the download. If the same file lock returns, Winsock was not the cause, so go back to handle and folder diagnosis.

Linux, Bazzite, and SteamOS: moves between drives

The Linux variant has a documented Steam-client failure mode. ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux issue #12139, “Moving game between drives fails with error ‘content file locked,’” was opened June 26, 2025. The report uses Linux Mint 22.1 and the May 20, 2025 Steam client. The move appears to run, then Steam throws Content File Locked and reverts it. The issue remains open and has 13 comments as read September 5, 2026.

That sequence matters. If a normal update fails, check for a process holding the library path. If the error appears only after choosing to move a title to another drive, the open Valve issue is the closer match. Repeating cache clears will not establish whether you hit that client bug.

On Bazzite or SteamOS, keep the game in the library where it still launches while you investigate the target drive and the open issue. I have not reproduced issue #12139 on those distributions, so I would not claim a distro-specific cure. The verified record ends at the Linux Mint report and the still-open ValveSoftware issue, which is the boundary this guide keeps instead of converting one distribution’s report into a universal Linux fix.

Sources

Microsoft Sysinternals — Process Explorer, page dated August 12, 2026.
Steam Community — “Content File Locked Error Resolved” by アンジェル, posted April 4, 2024. Community guide.
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux issue #12139 — “Moving game between drives fails with error ‘content file locked’”, opened June 26, 2025.
Microsoft Windows commands — netsh winsock, updated October 22, 2025.
Path of Exile forum thread 3607685, December 2024. Community report about Riot Vanguard during an update.