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Debloat Windows 11 (2026): What to Remove, What to Skip

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · Debloat Windows 11

Do it by hand first. Settings > Apps > Installed apps removes the inbox apps; four toggles under Personalization > Start and Privacy & security kill the recommendations and the advertising ID. Ten minutes, nothing to download.
It will not make the PC faster. PCMag measured a fresh 25H2 install at 1.9 to 2.1 GB of RAM on boot and no tool saved more than 100 to 200 MB.
Required diagnostic data stays on. Microsoft's own documentation says the off setting exists only on Enterprise, Education and Server. Every "disable telemetry" checkbox on Home and Pro drops you to Required, not to zero.
Use a script for what Settings hides: Copilot removal, search-box web suggestions, the Edge and lock-screen ads. Read the change list first, and know the two apps Win11Debloat says it cannot reinstall.

My own Windows 11 Home box is debloated. I know exactly what that means because I read it off the machine for this page: zero provisioned inbox apps left, 33 removable packages, every one of them something I installed or a codec, and the recommendation, advertising and web-search switches all off. That is the finished state. This page is the route to it, in the order that costs you the least trust in other people’s scripts. Settings first. Then PowerShell for the apps Settings refuses. Then the two big scripts, for the switches Settings hides. And a clear line around what nothing on Home or Pro can switch off.

Before you start

Decide what you want. Debloating means four different things and people mix them up. Removing apps you never open. Turning off the recommendations and ads Microsoft threads through the Start menu and the lock screen. Cutting what the machine reports back to Microsoft. Disabling features like Copilot. The first two are safe and reversible from Settings. The third has a floor you cannot go below. The fourth is where the scripts earn their keep.

Do not expect speed. PCMag’s Chris Hoffman installed Windows 11 25H2 in a 4 GB virtual machine and measured 1.9 to 2.1 GB of RAM on a fresh boot with nothing removed. He then ran Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility, Raphire’s Win11Debloat, Tiny11 Builder and Tiny11 Core Builder, and wrote that “none of the four tools I tested made much of a dent in Windows 11’s RAM usage. At most, they saved 100MB or 200MB.” If your machine feels slow in games, the causes are on the stuttering page and the freezing page, and a debloat script is not on either list.

Know the floor. Microsoft’s diagnostic-data documentation lists four levels and says of the lowest, “Diagnostic data off,” that it “is only available on Windows Server, Windows Enterprise, and Windows Education editions.” On Home and Pro the floor is Required. Hoffman makes the same point about the scripts in his test: they can flip a policy value, but “Windows will ignore it unless you’re using a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version of Windows 11.” My own box has the AllowTelemetry policy set to 1, which is Required, and that is as low as it goes.

Know what cannot come back. Win11Debloat’s wiki says “the only apps that cannot (easily) be reinstalled are the Microsoft Store itself and the XboxSpeechToTextOverlay,” and its app-removal page carries a warning on Windows Terminal: do not remove it if you launched the script from it. Leave the Store alone unless you have decided never to use a Store app again.

Make a restore point from Start, type “Create a restore point,” and hit Create. Then do the work.

Step 1: remove the apps (Settings, then PowerShell)

Microsoft’s own instruction is short: “Select Start > Settings > Apps > Installed apps. Find the app you want to remove, select More > Uninstall.” On my 25H2 box the page reads Apps > Installed apps in the breadcrumb, and every row has a More options button with Uninstall in it. Do this for the Xbox apps, Clipchamp, the new Outlook, Solitaire, News, Weather, To Do, Teams and anything else you never open. Microsoft adds that “Some apps can’t be uninstalled from the Settings app right now,” which is where PowerShell comes in.

Open Terminal and list what is installed:

Get-AppxPackage | Where-Object { -not $_.IsFramework -and -not $_.NonRemovable } | Select-Object Name | Sort-Object Name

That filter is the one I ran to get the 33-package figure above. Frameworks are runtime libraries other apps need. NonRemovable is Windows’ own flag for the shell pieces it will not let go; on my machine that second group holds 49 packages, and they stay. To remove one package for your account, Microsoft’s reference is Remove-AppxPackage -Package <full package name>, and it takes -WhatIf so you can see the effect before it happens:

Get-AppxPackage *Clipchamp* | Remove-AppxPackage -WhatIf
Get-AppxPackage *Clipchamp* | Remove-AppxPackage

The -AllUsers switch removes it for every account and needs an administrator terminal. Provisioned packages are the copies Windows installs for each new user account; Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online lists them, and on my box that list is empty, which is why a new account here starts clean. Removing provisioned packages needs Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online as administrator, and I would run the list first and read it before removing anything from it.

Step 2: turn off the recommendations and the ads

These are the toggles that make the machine feel debloated, and every one is in Settings. I opened each page on 25H2 to get the labels right; the values in brackets are what my box has.

Settings > Personalization > Start

Show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more [off]
Show recommended files in Start, recent files in File Explorer, and items in Jump Lists [off]
Show most used apps [off]
Show account-related notifications [off]

Settings > Privacy & security > Recommendations & offers (on 25H2 this is the page the old General link opens)

Personalized offers, “Get personalized tips, ads, and recommendations based on my Windows activity” [off]
Advertising ID, “Let apps show me personalized ads by using my advertising ID” [off]
Recommendations and offers in Settings [off]
Improve Start and search results, “Let Windows improve Start and search results by tracking which apps I open” [on on my box; turn it off if app-launch tracking bothers you]

Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback

Diagnostic data, “Helps to improve Windows and keep it secure, up to date, and working as expected” [reads Off on my box, and the page carries the banner “Some of these settings are managed by your organization,” which is what a policy value set by a script looks like from Settings]. Required stays on regardless, per the floor above.
Improve inking and typing, “Send optional inking and typing diagnostic data to Microsoft” [off]
Delete diagnostic data, further down the same page, clears what Microsoft has collected from this device.

Settings > System > Notifications > Additional settings holds the “tips and suggestions” and “welcome experience” boxes. Clear them.

Step 3: the switches Settings hides on Home

Two things people want gone have no toggle in the Home edition’s Settings app, and this is the only place I reach for a policy value or a script.

Web results in the Start search box. My box has the Explorer policy value DisableSearchBoxSuggestions set to 1 under HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer, and the Start search box returns only local results. That value is the one Microsoft’s Q&A answers give for the job, and it is the mechanism behind Win11Debloat’s default tweak “Disable & remove Bing web search, Bing AI and Cortana from Windows search.” One Microsoft Q&A thread reports the value also disabling taskbar search on some builds; on my 25H2 box the search box works and simply stops showing web results. Set it by script or by hand in the registry editor, then sign out and back in.

Copilot. The Copilot app uninstalls from Installed apps like any other Store app, and that is the removal that holds. My box also carries TurnOffWindowsCopilot set to 1 under HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot, and no Copilot package is installed, but read Microsoft’s note on that policy before you copy it: the WindowsAI policy reference marks it deprecated and says it “isn’t for the new Copilot experience.” Win11Debloat’s default list includes “Disable & remove Microsoft Copilot” and, on 25H2, “Disable Windows Recall” and “Disable Click to Do,” which map to the Recall and Click to Do policies Microsoft documents under Windows AI.

Step 4: the scripts, and what each one changes

Two scripts own this search result, and both are open source with their change lists published, which is the only reason I would run either.

Win11Debloat (Raphire, release 2026.08.24, repository last pushed 2026-09-10). The README’s one-line run is & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://debloat.raphi.re/"))) in PowerShell, or download the release and run Run.bat. Its default tweaks, quoted from the wiki: “Disable telemetry, diagnostic data, activity history, app-launch tracking & targeted ads,” “Disable tips, tricks, suggestions & ads across Windows,” “Disable ads, suggestions and the MSN news feed in Microsoft Edge,” “Disable & remove Bing web search, Bing AI and Cortana from Windows search,” “Disable & remove Microsoft Copilot,” “Disable Windows Recall,” “Disable widgets on the taskbar & lockscreen,” and “Show file extensions for known file types,” among others. It also removes a default list of apps that runs from the Bing apps and Solitaire to Candy Crush, Disney+, Netflix, Spotify and TikTok. PCMag’s test flagged one default I would uncheck: it disables Fast Startup, so the machine does a full shutdown every time. Reverting is documented: “Almost all changes can be reverted simply by running the script again and unchecking any tweaks you want to undo,” plus a Restore backup option and undo registry files shipped with the script.

WinUtil (Chris Titus Tech, release 26.08.19). Run irm https://christitus.com/win | iex from an administrator terminal; the README says it “must be run as Administrator because it performs system-wide changes.” It ships three presets, Standard, Minimal and Advanced, and points to config/preset.json for what each does. Hoffman’s finding on the Standard preset is the one to know before you click it: it “sets a large number of background system services to launch manually when programs access them, rather than automatically at boot,” which saved no meaningful RAM in his test and “might introduce delays in regular computer use.”

My rule for both is short. Run the manual steps first. Then open the script, uncheck everything you already did or do not understand, and apply the two or three switches you came for. A script that changes forty things you did not read about is not a debloat. It is someone else’s preferences.

Step 5: check that it worked

Run the Get-AppxPackage filter from Step 1 again and count the rows. Mine is 33, and every name on the list is something I recognise.
Open Start. No “Recommended” section, no app suggestions.
Open Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback and confirm optional data is off. It will not say “off” for required data on Home or Pro, and nothing you ran changed that.
Type a word into the Start search box and confirm the results are local only.
Reboot twice. Windows Update reinstalls nothing you removed from Settings, but Hoffman is right that an update “might reinstall parts of Windows you removed or otherwise undo your changes” when a script has cut deeper than Settings goes, so check the list again after the next feature update.

If the reason you came here was a game that stutters or a PC that feels slow, the debloat is done and the cause is elsewhere: read games keep crashing for the launcher and anti-cheat faults, and the two settings pages that do move frame times, hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling and V-Sync on or off.

Sources

Microsoft Support, Uninstall or remove apps and programs in Windows (Settings > Apps > Installed apps; “Some apps can’t be uninstalled from the Settings app right now”): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uninstall-or-remove-apps-and-programs-in-windows-4b55f974-2cc6-2d2b-d092-5905080eaf98
Microsoft Learn, Remove-AppxPackage (syntax, -AllUsers, -WhatIf): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/appx/remove-appxpackage
Microsoft Learn, Configure Windows diagnostic data in your organization (the four levels; “Diagnostic data off” only on Server, Enterprise and Education): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-windows-diagnostic-data-in-your-organization
Raphire, Win11Debloat: README, Default-Settings, App-Removal and Reverting-Changes wiki pages; release 2026.08.24: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Chris Titus Tech, winutil: README and presets; release 26.08.19: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Microsoft Learn, WindowsAI Policy CSP (TurnOffWindowsCopilot marked deprecated and “isn’t for the new Copilot experience”; DisableAIDataAnalysis and DisableClickToDo): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/mdm/policy-csp-windowsai
Microsoft Q&A, DisableSearchBoxSuggestions disables task bar search (the registry value and its reported side effect): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3234673/disablesearchboxsuggestions-disables-task-bar-sear
PCMag, Chris Hoffman, I Put 4 Windows Debloating Tools to the Test. The Results Were Embarrassing, April 13, 2026 (RAM measurements, Fast Startup and services findings, the LTSC note): https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/i-put-4-windows-debloating-tools-to-the-test-the-results-were-embarrassing

GPU Sag Census: Measured Droop by Card, in Millimetres

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-12 · ~5 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

“How much GPU sag is too much” is answered on every forum with a feeling and on no page with a measurement. As of a September 2026 check I could not find a dataset anywhere that records how far real cards droop, in millimetres, next to the card’s length, the mounting and the months it had been installed. This page opens that census. One row is one card somebody put a ruler on. Per-model distributions publish once a model has enough unsupported horizontal readings, and the page never publishes a verdict.

The raw data, schema, intake form and validator live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/gpu-sag-census (CC BY 4.0).

If you are here because your card looks like it is about to snap off the slot, the diagnosis, the fixes in order and the RMA rule are on the GPU sag guide. This page is the measurement.

Why distributions, never verdicts

Droop is a lever-arm effect: the card hangs from the PCIe slot and the bracket screws at one end, the cooler mass sits along its length, and the far end is free. How far it drops depends on the card’s length and mass, the slot and the board it is soldered to, how long the card has hung there, and what the machine went through in a shipping box. Two owners of the same model in different cases will read different numbers, and one photo of one card proves nothing about the model.

So the per-model answer is never “the RTX 4090 sags” or “it doesn’t.” It is a distribution: out of n measured cards, the median droop, the smallest and largest reading, and the share of cards in each band. That is what this page publishes, and always with the sample size in the same breath as the number.

The schema

One row = one physical card, measured once, in one mounting. Full machine-readable definitions live in schema.json.

Field	Required	What it records
`card_brand`	yes	As printed on the box: ASUS, Gigabyte, NVIDIA
`card_model`	yes	Model line, specific enough to group units: “ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC”, “Gaming OC RTX 4090”
`exact_sku`	no	Exact manufacturer SKU when known
`card_length_mm`	yes	Length from the manufacturer’s spec page, rounded to a whole mm
`card_slots`	no	Slot thickness as the manufacturer states it: 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 3.8
`mount`	yes	`horizontal` (straight into the board) or `vertical` (on a riser)
`support`	yes	What was holding the far end up when measured: `none`, `bundled-holder`, `aftermarket-bracket`, `cable-tension`, `case-integrated`, `diy`
`months_installed`	yes	Whole months the card had hung in this mounting when measured
`droop_mm`	yes	Far-end drop relative to the bracket end, whole millimetres; a level card is 0
`measurement_method`	yes	`ruler-straightedge`, `calipers`, or `photo-estimate`
`slot_reinforced`	no	Whether the board’s x16 slot is metal-reinforced per its spec page
`symptoms`	no	Any fault the owner attributes to the sag: `none`, `intermittent-detection`, `artifacts`, `no-display`, `other`
`notes`	no	Free text, max 280 characters
`submitted_date`	yes	ISO date of the report

The droop bands (anchored)

Droop	Reading
0–2 mm	Level; within measurement noise
3–5 mm	Visible droop
6–10 mm	Clear droop
11 mm and above	Severe droop

The bands are fixed on purpose. Changing them would make old and new rows incomparable, so any future change bumps the dataset’s major version instead of quietly redefining the numbers.

How to measure

Power the machine down. Leave the card installed.
For the row that counts, take any bracket, holder or prop out from under the far end.
Lay a straightedge along the card’s bottom edge at the bracket end, parallel to the slot.
At the far end, read how far the card’s bottom edge sits below the straightedge, in whole millimetres. Calipers against a fixed reference are fine too.
Note how many months the card has been in this mounting. Put the support back.

A photo estimate is accepted as a row and excluded from the medians. A ruler is what makes a number count.

How to submit a card

One report = one card you own, measured by you. A level card is one of the most wanted rows in the census, because it is the half of the distribution that never turns up in a forum thread.

No git knowledge needed. Fill in the GPU sag report issue form. It mirrors the schema field-for-field; a maintainer transcribes accepted reports into the CSV, with submitted_date taken from the issue’s creation date.
The CSV path. Add one row to data/submissions.csv following the schema and open a pull request. A stdlib validator runs on every PR that touches the data, schema or validator, and blocks malformed rows.

Every submission passes two layers before it lands: the mechanical schema check, and a maintainer review for outlier and troll patterns, such as bursts of new accounts filing the same model at the same droop, a card length that does not match the model’s spec page, or rows that summarize other people’s threads instead of a card the submitter measured. The full acceptance rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

What publishes as the census grows

The activation floor, stated verbatim: per-model n + droop distribution once a model has >=5 rows measured with support=none in a horizontal mount. Below that floor a model is listed as collecting, with no numbers attached. As models cross the floor, their distributions render on this page: n first, then the median, the smallest and largest reading, and the share of cards in each band.

A site-wide number publishes once the unsupported horizontal set reaches n=20: the median droop across every such card, with n beside it. That is the press number this census is built to produce, and it does not exist yet.

The census opened at 0 rows on 2026-09-12. My own card is an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC, and it hangs vertically on the riser in a HYTE Y60, so it has nothing to droop from and cannot seed the horizontal table. Every row here will be a real owner reporting a real card.

Current count: n=0. Every model is listed as collecting.

The verdict rules

No verdicts below n = 5. A model with three alarming photos is collecting, not “a sagger.”
Supported rows are kept and excluded from the medians. A card measured with a holder in place reports what the holder did.
Photo estimates are kept and excluded from the medians. A ruler is required for a number to count.
Reports are self-selected. Owners who noticed a droop are more likely to measure it, so published figures describe submitted cards and do not estimate what any given card will do.
Bands never drift. The four bands above are frozen; a change would be a new major version, and old rows would be marked as read on the old bands.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

The live dataset is one file: data/submissions.csv, one row per measured card, in the schema order above. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute as “TechFuelHQ Community GPU Sag Census” linking to this page.

The coil whine census is the sibling dataset, built on the same rules for the other thing heavy cards do. If your card’s problem is not its shape, the GPU artifacts guide and the graphics card not detected guide cover the two faults that get blamed on sag.

Change log

0.1.0 (2026-09-12) — schema, the four droop bands, intake (issue form + PR path), validator, and the empty census opened: 0 rows, no seeded data.

GPU Sag: Is It Bad, How Much Is Normal, and the Fix (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · GPU sag

A few millimetres of droop on a heavy card is normal. The card hangs from a slot and two bracket screws with its far end in the air; the lever arm does the rest.
Support it anyway. The holder in the box, a cheap adjustable post, or a vertical mount. Lift to level, no further.
Two faults trace back to sag: a card that drops off the bus, and a PCB stressed at the slot lock. Tom's Hardware documented Gigabyte RTX 40 boards cracking exactly there.
Measure it before you fix it, straightedge at the bracket end, ruler at the far end, and add the number to the GPU sag census. Nobody has that data.

Every big card I have owned drooped a little. None of them died of it. That is the whole tension in this question: sag is normal, it looks alarming, and in a small number of cases it does real damage at the one place a card cannot afford it, the PCIe slot.

This page separates sag from the faults it gets blamed for, gives you a measurement instead of a feeling, ranks the fixes by how reversible they are, and opens a census so the “how much is too much” question finally gets an answer with a sample size behind it. Measure first. Then brace.

Step 1: is it sag at all?

Sag is a shape. The fault people search for is usually something else, and it has its own page. Read the signature before you touch anything.

What you see	It is probably	Go here
The far end of the card sits visibly lower than the bracket end; the gap between card and the slot below it narrows toward the front	GPU sag. Keep reading.	This page
Coloured blocks, checkerboards or flicker in games; screenshots show the glitches too	Artifacts, which are a render-side fault; sag is on the list of physical causes only after a driver reinstall and a re-seat	GPU artifacts
The card comes and goes, or vanishes from the BIOS after the machine is moved	Detection, and here sag is a real suspect: Puget Systems warns that in severe cases the card can stop being detected	Graphics card not detected
Fans spin, no picture at all, motherboard VGA light stays lit	No POST on the GPU stage, almost always seating or power, occasionally a slot damaged by a drooping card	PC turns on but no display
A high-pitched electronic whine under load	Coil whine, an inductor noise unrelated to weight	Coil whine
The card is level but the fans never start	Fan control or a fan fault, not sag	GPU fans not spinning
A hairline crack in the PCB right beside the PCIe locking tab	A cracked board, the injury sag is accused of; Tom’s Hardware’s February 2024 report recalls “a repair technician received 19 cracked RTX 4090 graphics cards, all featuring PCB cracks near the PCIe locking mechanism”	Stop using the card and read when to RMA below

If your symptom is in the middle rows, fix that first and come back. Sag as a root cause is rare. Sag as a contributing stress on a card that then fails is the case worth preventing.

What I measured on my own hardware

Nothing. The reason is the useful part. My bench card is an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC, which ASUS lists at 357.6 x 149.3 x 76 mm and a 3.8-slot cooler, with “1 x ROG Graphics Card Holder” in the box. Mine lives in a HYTE Y60, and the Y60’s spec sheet lists “Expansion Slots 3 + 7 half-height” and a “PCI Express Riser 4.0 x 16 (included).” Half-height slots on the motherboard side mean a full-height card in that case goes on the riser, vertical, fans to the glass. A vertical card has nothing to droop from. So my droop reading is zero by construction. It says nothing about what this card would do hanging horizontally in an ordinary tower. It also means a PCIe 5.0 card is running on a PCIe 4.0 riser, and I have not measured what that costs.

The motherboard under it is a ROG STRIX B650-A Gaming WiFi, and its spec page lists SafeSlot, ASUS’s reinforced-slot feature, under ASUS EZ DIY. Puget Systems pointed at the same idea back in 2016: “Some motherboards have the slots reinforced with a metal jacket and various universal video card braces are available online.” That is why the census records whether your slot is reinforced. I want to know whether it changes the number.

So the horizontal droop numbers this page needs have to come from horizontal builds. That is what the GPU sag census is for. The bench card that seeded the coil whine census cannot seed this one.

The causes, in the order I check them

I have no frequency data on sag causes. Nobody has published any. So this is the order I check in, cheapest test first.

1. The lever arm. Puget Systems describes sag as “the weight and/or length of its heatsink pulling downward on the slot it is installed in,” and that is the whole mechanism. A card is anchored at the PCIe slot and at the bracket screws, both at one end; the cooler mass sits along the length; the far end is free. Isolation test: power down, lay a straightedge along the bottom edge at the bracket end, and read the gap at the far end with a ruler. That reading, in whole millimetres, is the number the rest of this page runs on.

2. Bracket screws and the I/O shield. A bracket that is not pulled tight against the case, or an I/O shield tab that stopped the bracket seating flat, leaves the card’s only rigid anchor loose. Isolation test: tighten both bracket screws and see whether the far end lifts. If it does, you had a loose card. Not a sagging one.

3. Slot and board flex. The slot itself is plastic, soldered to a board that is screwed to standoffs. Puget’s advice on reinforced slots and vertical mounting exists because both parts flex under a sustained load. Isolation test: with the machine off, press the far end of the card gently up to level and watch the slot end. If the whole board moves, the motherboard is carrying the load. A support post is the fix.

4. Handling before you ever saw it. Tom’s Hardware’s note on the Gigabyte cracks is worth repeating: the problem “seems to be more pronounced in pre-built systems that were roughly handled in shipping.” A prebuilt that travelled with an unsupported three-slot card may arrive with the stress already applied. Isolation test: on a new prebuilt, look at the slot lock area with a torch before the first boot.

The fix sequence, reversible first

Fit the holder that came in the box. If the card shipped with a stand, it was sized for that card. Mine came with one. Owners in the r/buildapc thread report a Strix RTX 4080 and a Hellhound RX 7900 XTX shipping with stands too. Ten minutes. Fully reversible.
An adjustable support post or bracket. Corsair’s own guidance is that “a GPU support bracket is an excellent way to combat GPU sag.” A telescoping post under the far end of the card, screwed up until the card is level, is the version I trust most, because you can set the height by eye against the straightedge. Do not lift past level.
Cable tension as a stopgap. A stiff power cable routed so it carries a little of the weight will hold a card level for a while. It is not a fix. Cables relax, and I would not leave a heavy card on one for a year.
A vertical mount. Corsair lists a riser-based vertical mount as a way of “reducing the strain on the PCIe slot and eliminating sagging,” and Puget lists cases with vertical mounting. This is what my own build does by accident of case choice. Check the riser’s PCIe generation against the card’s before you buy one.
A reinforced slot on the next board. Not a fix for the board you have, but a reason to read the spec sheet next time.

What not to do: do not wedge anything against the fan shroud where a blade can catch it; do not prop the card so hard that the far end sits above the bracket end, because a card bent upward loads the slot in the other direction; and do not ignore a card that has already dropped off the bus once. A top-voted reply in the r/buildapc thread says any support that keeps the card level is fine, and one owner reports a sag that ruined a PCIe slot. Both are owner reports, and both match the mechanism.

When to RMA rather than brace

A visible crack at the PCIe lock, a card that is no longer detected after a re-seat in a known-good slot, or artifacts that survive a driver reinstall on a card with a visible droop. Tom’s Hardware reported that Gigabyte responded to its cracking cases with a new PCB design that “features more surface area near the PCIe locking tab” and shipped the new boards as the v1.1 revision. That is a manufacturer answering the failure mode with a redesign, and it is the strongest argument on this page for spending the ten minutes on a support.

The census

Every guide on this subject I could find as of September 2026, this one included, argues about a number nobody has published a measurement of. So the companion dataset measures it: the GPU sag census collects one row per card, with the droop in millimetres, the card’s length, the mounting, what was supporting it, how many months it had been installed, and whether the slot is reinforced. It copies the coil whine census exactly: CC BY 4.0, an open repository at github.com/iBlessi/gpu-sag-census, an issue form so you need no git, a CSV for people who do, and a stdlib validator that blocks malformed rows.

The bands are fixed so old and new rows stay comparable:

Droop	Reading
0–2 mm	level; within measurement noise
3–5 mm	visible droop
6–10 mm	clear droop
11 mm and above	severe droop

The rule is the same one the coil whine census runs on. The page publishes per-model distributions once a model has five rows measured with no support in a horizontal mount. It never publishes a verdict, because the droop depends on the case, the slot, the cooler and the months as much as the model. And a level card is a first-class row. If your card does not sag, that is the row I most want.

The bottom line

A heavy card drooping a few millimetres is physics. The card will almost certainly be fine. Support it anyway, because the fix is ten minutes and reversible, and the failure it prevents is a cracked board at the one point that cannot be repaired at home. Measure before you brace. Put the number in the census. Then lift the card to level and forget about it.

Sources

ASUS ROG, ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition, Tech Specs (dimensions 357.6 x 149.3 x 76 mm, 3.8 slot, ROG Graphics Card Holder in the box): https://rog.asus.com/graphics-cards/graphics-cards/rog-astral/rog-astral-rtx5080-o16g-gaming/spec/
ASUS ROG, ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI, Tech Specs (SafeSlot under ASUS EZ DIY): https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-b650-a-gaming-wifi-model/spec/
HYTE, Y60 (Expansion Slots 3 + 7 half-height; PCI Express Riser 4.0 x 16 included): https://hyte.com/store/y60
NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 5070 family specifications (Founders Edition 242 mm, 2-slot): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/rtx-5070-family/
Puget Systems, GPU Sag, November 28, 2016 (mechanism, detection risk, reinforced slots, vertical mounting, “insurance plan”): https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2016/11/28/gpu-sag-867/
Corsair Explorer, How do I avoid GPU Sag? (brackets, custom supports, vertical mounting): https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/accessories/how-do-i-avoid-gpu-sag/
Tom’s Hardware, Gigabyte addresses PCB cracking issues with a revised design, February 10, 2024 (cracks near the PCIe locking mechanism, 19 cracked RTX 4090s at one repair shop, v1.1 PCB revision, shipping handling): https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/gigabyte-addresses-pcb-cracking-issues-with-a-revised-design
Reddit r/buildapc, Is GPU sag a serious issue? (owner reports: bundled stands on a Strix RTX 4080 and a Hellhound RX 7900 XTX; one ruined slot): https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/16z49hh/is_gpu_sag_a_serious_issue/

Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2: Buy It, or a Sonoff? (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · Connect ZBT-2

Buy it for a first Zigbee network on a Home Assistant box that sits where the stick can sit, or for a Thread border router you can switch to later. $49 MSRP, cable and antenna in the box, ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT and OpenThread all supported.
It is one radio. Zigbee or Thread, never both at once, and no Bluetooth or Z-Wave. Both networks means two sticks.
Skip it when the Home Assistant machine lives in a rack or closet and the radio needs to live in the house: the SMLIGHT SLZB-06 goes on Ethernet with PoE. Skip it for Z-Wave; that is the ZWA-2.
Owners of a ZBT-1 or SkyConnect keep using it. Discontinued, still updated, same hardware under both names.

Home Assistant’s own Zigbee stick got a second generation in November 2025, and the search interest in it has climbed hard since. The question people bring is not “is it good”; the owner reports say it is. The question is whether it is the right radio for the machine and the house it is going into, and that turns on four things the product page will not decide for you. I have no ZBT-2 on my bench, so this page is built from the vendor documents and the owner threads, and the verdict is my position on them.

The deciders that matter, ranked

1. One radio runs one protocol. Nabu Casa’s specification page says it plainly: “Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 supports either the Zigbee or Thread protocol. You can choose the protocol during setup and also switch later, if needed. Running Zigbee and Thread at the same time on the same adapter is not supported.” So the ZBT-2 is a Zigbee coordinator or a Thread border router, and if you want Zigbee devices and Matter-over-Thread devices in the same house you need two radios. The same page adds that Home Assistant’s ZHA integration “is single instance only” and that “you cannot run 2 Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 adapters with the Zigbee Home Automation integration at once.” Two ZBT-2s means one on ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT and one on Thread, not two Zigbee networks.

2. Where the radio can physically sit. The ZBT-2 is a USB stick. Home Assistant ships it with a 1.5 m USB-C cable and a 164 mm external antenna precisely because the ZHA documentation tells you to keep the radio away from the computer: “Avoid USB 3.0 ports/computers/peripherals as they are known culprits of RFI/EMI/EMF disruption,” “only connect the Zigbee USB adapter to a USB 2.0 port,” and “use a long USB extension cable and place Zigbee Coordinator away from interference and obstacles.” A cable solves that for a Home Assistant Green on a shelf. It does not solve it for a Proxmox host in a basement rack, and that is the case where a network-attached coordinator wins. The top reply in the r/homeassistant thread makes the same cut: the ZBT-2 “is great if you’re using ZHA and have a good place to put it,” and “isn’t great if you want to connect it over something other than USB, for instance ethernet.” The mini PC for Home Assistant page covers the USB 3 interference trap in detail.

3. Which Zigbee software you run. Nabu Casa lists ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT and OpenThread Border Router as supported, and Home Assistant’s blog says “many people with Zigbee2MQTT … are seeing great results.” Its support library carries migration guides from Zigbee2MQTT, deCONZ and an existing ZHA network onto the ZBT-2, so moving a network is a documented path rather than a re-pair. The Zigbee and Z-Wave tutorial is the setup walk-through for either path.

4. Z-Wave is a different stick. The ZBT-2 “does not support Bluetooth or Z-Wave.” Home Assistant’s Z-Wave radio is the Connect ZWA-2, a Silicon Labs ZG23 800-series stick that its product page prices at $69 / 59€ and that runs “Z-Wave and Z-Wave Long Range networks simultaneously.” If your devices are Z-Wave, the ZBT-2 does nothing for you.

5. Price against the cheap dongle. The ZBT-2’s recommended price is $49 USD / €45. ITead lists the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus, the ZBDongle-P, at $19.90 with a CC2652P, +20 dBm output and an SMA antenna. Both work with ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. The Sonoff is a Zigbee coordinator only; it has no Thread firmware path. If Thread is never coming to your house, the price gap buys nothing.

6. The radio itself. The generation change is real. Home Assistant’s announcement says the ZBT-2 moves from the MG21 to the Silicon Labs MG24, quadruples the chip’s internal link speed from 115,200 to 460,800 baud, and grows the antenna from “safety pin-sized” to “tablespoon-sized.” It also puts an ESP32-S3 on the stick as the USB bridge, which the blog frames as room for future firmware work. None of that changes the one-protocol rule.

Side by side

	Connect ZBT-2	Connect ZBT-1 (SkyConnect)	Sonoff ZBDongle-P	SMLIGHT SLZB-06	Connect ZWA-2
Protocols	Zigbee 3.0 or Thread, one at a time	Zigbee or Thread, one at a time	Zigbee 3.0	Zigbee 3.0 (Thread noted in SMLIGHT’s guides)	Z-Wave and Z-Wave Long Range
Radio	Silicon Labs MG24 + ESP32-S3 bridge	Silicon Labs MG21	TI CC2652P + CP2102(N)	TI CC2652P + ESP32	Silicon Labs ZG23 + ESP32-S3 bridge
Link	USB-C, 1.5 m cable and external antenna in the box; 460,800 baud	USB, 115,200 baud	USB-A, SMA antenna, +20 dBm	Ethernet with PoE (802.3af), Wi-Fi, or USB-C	USB-C, 5 V 1 A
Software	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT, OpenThread Border Router	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT, OpenThread	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT	ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT	Z-Wave JS
Bluetooth	No	No	No	No	Antenna present but inactive
Price on the vendor page	$49 / €45 MSRP	Discontinued	$19.90	Not listed; set by resellers	$69 / 59€
Status	Shipping since November 19, 2025	Out of production, still receives software updates	Current	Current	Current

Every cell is from the vendor page cited in the sources below; I measured none of it.

What I would run, and why

I have no ZBT-2 on the bench, and the Zigbee stick is not part of the hardware this site documents as mine, so read this as a position and not a report.

For a first Zigbee network on a Home Assistant Green, Yellow, or a mini PC on a shelf, I would buy the ZBT-2 and run it on ZHA with the cable, antenna vertical, away from any USB 3 port. It is the stick Home Assistant’s own docs list first, it is the one the migration guides are written for, and if Matter-over-Thread devices arrive later it can become the border router while a $20 Sonoff takes over Zigbee.

For a Home Assistant VM on a Proxmox box in a closet, I would buy the SLZB-06 and put it on a PoE port in the middle of the house, because the radio’s location matters more than the radio’s chip and the Proxmox setup already has enough USB passthrough in it. The ZBT-2 on a 1.5 m cable does not reach the middle of a house from a rack.

For a house that already runs a Sonoff dongle without dropouts, I would change nothing. The owners in the r/homeassistant thread who report the ZBT-1 running “a handful of Zigbee devices (~30 or so?)” with no problems are describing the normal case, and Home Assistant says the ZBT-1 keeps getting updates. Spend the $49 when you have a reason: Thread, a dying stick, or a coordinator too far from the devices it serves.

The bottom line

The ZBT-2 is the right default Zigbee radio for a Home Assistant machine the stick can sit next to, and the right Thread border router for the same machine, but not both at the same time. Decide the protocol first, then the room the radio lives in, and the choice between the ZBT-2, a Sonoff and an SLZB-06 makes itself. Z-Wave is a different stick, and a working ZBT-1 is not a reason to buy anything.

Sources

Nabu Casa Support, About Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (one protocol at a time; no Bluetooth or Z-Wave; MG24 and ESP32-S3; ZHA single instance): https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/articles/31313065259421-About-Home-Assistant-Connect-ZBT-2
Nabu Casa Support, Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 status light (LEDs): https://support.nabucasa.com/hc/en-us/articles/31368700350109-Home-Assistant-Connect-ZBT-2-status-light-LEDs
Home Assistant, Connect ZBT-2 product page (cable, antenna, MSRP, supported integrations): https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zbt-2/
Home Assistant blog, The best gets better - Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, November 19, 2025 (MG21 to MG24, 115,200 to 460,800 baud, antenna, ZBT-1 production ended): https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/11/19/home-assistant-connect-zbt-2/
Home Assistant, Connect ZBT-1 product page (no longer in production, still updated; formerly SkyConnect): https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
Home Assistant, Connect ZWA-2 product page (ZG23, Z-Wave plus Long Range, $69 / 59€): https://www.home-assistant.io/connect/zwa-2/
Home Assistant, Zigbee Home Automation integration documentation (USB 3.0 interference and extension-cable guidance; recommended radios): https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/
ITead, SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-P (CC2652P, +20 dBm, $19.90): https://itead.cc/product/sonoff-zigbee-3-0-usb-dongle-plus/
SMLIGHT, SLZB-06 (CC2652P, PoE 802.3af, Wi-Fi, USB-C): http://smlight.tech/product/slzb-06
Reddit r/homeassistant, Is the Connect ZBT-2 the way to go for a Zigbee bridge? (owner reports): https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1phsj5c/is_the_connect_zbt2_the_way_to_go_for_a_zigbee/

VSync On or Off? The Right Setting for Your Monitor (2026)

LK Wood IV — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TL;DR · VSync on or off

G-Sync, G-Sync Compatible or FreeSync monitor: ON in the driver, OFF in the game, and cap the frame rate about 3 fps under the refresh rate. That is the lowest tear-free latency Blur Busters measured.
Fixed-refresh monitor, competitive shooter: OFF. You accept tearing and get every frame as soon as it is drawn.
Fixed-refresh monitor, single-player: ON if tearing bothers you, Fast Sync or Enhanced Sync if your frame rate runs far above refresh.
Frame rate below refresh on a fixed-refresh panel: OFF. Double-buffered V-Sync drops you to half rate, which is worse than a tear.
Where it lives: NVIDIA App > Graphics > Global Settings > Vertical Sync, verified on 11.0.9. On Radeon, the driver switch only governs OpenGL; DirectX and Vulkan games use their own toggle.

My bench machine runs an RTX 5080 into a 120 Hz OLED, and the driver’s Vertical Sync switch on it has been set to On for months. Most forum answers would call that wrong. They are wrong. It is the correct setting for a variable refresh monitor, and the reason it looks wrong is that the switch stopped meaning “V-Sync” on VRR displays years ago.

This page gives you the setting for your monitor, the exact place to change it in the current NVIDIA App and in AMD’s software, and the measured latency numbers behind the advice. If what you have is a tearing problem to fix rather than a switch to decide, the screen tearing guide has the full VRR setup and the cap table; I will not repeat those here.

What the setting does

V-Sync makes the GPU wait for the display’s next refresh before it hands over a finished frame, so one redraw never shows pieces of two frames. NVIDIA’s own reference puts it plainly: the setting “allows you to control Vertical Synchronization mode, where the application’s frame rate is synchronized with the display refresh rate in order to eliminate tearing.” Two things follow from that wait. A finished frame sits until the next refresh, which is latency. And when the GPU cannot produce a frame every refresh, plain double-buffered V-Sync misses the window and falls to a divisor; NVIDIA’s Adaptive VSync page describes it as locking “the frame rate to the nearest level, such as 45 or 30 frames per second.” That second effect is the stutter people blame on V-Sync, and it is why the right answer changes with your frame rate and your monitor.

The decision table

Your setup	Set V-Sync	Why
G-Sync, G-Sync Compatible or FreeSync monitor	On in the driver, off in the game, frame rate capped about 3 fps under refresh	Inside the VRR range, G-Sync or FreeSync is the only sync running. Driver V-Sync on stops tearing at the top of the range. The cap keeps you out of the V-Sync region entirely.
Fixed-refresh monitor, competitive shooter	Off	Lowest latency there is. Blur Busters’ author jorimt states it flat in the G-SYNC 101 comments: G-Sync off with V-Sync off and an uncapped frame rate “will always be the lowest possible latency,” because it tears.
Fixed-refresh monitor, single-player	On	Tearing is gone, and the added frame or two of latency is a fair trade in a game where you are not clicking heads.
Fixed-refresh monitor, frame rate far above refresh	Fast (NVIDIA) or Enhanced Sync (AMD)	Both drop excess frames instead of holding them. NVIDIA’s reference says Fast “improves latency without introducing tearing” on Pascal and later single-GPU setups.
Fixed-refresh monitor, frame rate below refresh	Off	Double-buffered V-Sync will halve you. A tear beats 30 fps. On the legacy NVIDIA panel, Adaptive is the alternative.
Laptop on battery	Cap the frame rate instead, V-Sync on is fine for single-player	NVIDIA’s Max Frame Rate support page is explicit that a cap saves power and works alongside Battery Boost and Whisper Mode; the lowest limit wins.
60 Hz TV or monitor without VRR	On for anything slower than a shooter	At 60 Hz a tear sits on screen for a full 16.6 ms and is easy to see. Cap at 60 in-game if the game offers it, so the GPU is not rendering frames the panel drops.

The first row is the one that trips people up, so here is the mechanism. Blur Busters’ G-SYNC 101 explains that with G-Sync enabled, the driver’s “Vertical Sync” option “no longer acts as V-SYNC” and instead decides whether G-Sync falls back to fixed-refresh V-Sync behaviour above its range or disables and lets the whole display tear. Within the range, they write, “G-SYNC is the only syncing method active, no matter the V-SYNC ‘On’ or ‘Off’ setting.” So On costs you nothing inside the range and saves you from tearing at the ceiling. The cap is what keeps you inside the range. That is the whole trick.

The cap does the latency work. The switch is a safety net.

How to set it

NVIDIA App

I read these paths off my own machine on 2026-09-12, on NVIDIA App 11.0.9 and Game Ready driver 616.56. The global switch is at Graphics > Global Settings > Vertical Sync. The dropdown offers four values on this system: Use 3D app setting (Default), Off, On and Fast. Nothing else. The per-game version is Graphics > Program Settings, pick the game, then Vertical Sync in its Driver Settings list; Blur Busters recommends setting On there, per game, rather than globally. Monitor Technology sits a few rows above Vertical Sync in the same list and reads G-SYNC Compatible on my FO48U, which is the row that makes the On setting behave as described above.

NVIDIA has retired the classic Control Panel for Game Ready and Studio Drivers. Its May 26, 2026 driver announcement says that “after 20 years of dedicated service, the classic NVIDIA Control Panel is officially retiring for Game Ready and Studio Drivers,” that existing installs “will remain on users’ systems, unless they perform a clean installation,” and that anyone who still needs it “can continue to download it from the Microsoft Store.” If you still have it, the setting is under Manage 3D settings > Vertical sync, and that legacy list carries two extra values. NVIDIA’s reference describes Adaptive as turning “V-Sync On only when the frame rate is faster than the refresh rate,” describes Adaptive 1/2 refresh rate as the same test against half the refresh rate, and notes that both are “available only if Monitor Technology is set to ULMB or Fixed Refresh Rate.” That matches what I see in the new app with a G-Sync Compatible panel connected. No Adaptive entry at all.

AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition

AMD’s Adrenalin guide, support article DH3-012, shows a Last Updated stamp of March 3, 2025 and says its steps are based on AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.9.1. It lists both switches in Global Graphics: “Wait for Vertical Refresh, also known as vsync, removes screen tearing by synchronizing the frame rate with the monitor refresh rate,” and “Radeon Enhanced Sync is an alternative vsync mode that reduces visual tearing without limiting frame rates.” AMD’s older Radeon Settings article gives the four values the switch takes: Always Off; Off, Unless Application Specifies; On, Unless Application Specifies; and Always On.

The line most guides miss is on that same AMD page: “Wait for Vertical Refresh only works OpenGL 3D applications. When using other APIs such as DirectX or Vulkan, VSync is controlled via the 3D application graphics settings.” That covers nearly every game you will run; on Windows, OpenGL is the exception now. So on a Radeon card the in-game toggle is the one that matters. The driver switch is for the handful of OpenGL titles and emulators you still run.

There is no Radeon card on my bench, so these are AMD’s paths and not my screenshots.

In the game

Every game with a video settings menu has some form of the switch, labelled V-Sync, Vertical Sync or occasionally Triple Buffering. On a VRR monitor, Blur Busters’ instruction is to “disable all available ‘Vertical Sync,’ ‘V-SYNC,’ ‘Double Buffer,’ and ‘Triple Buffer’ options” in-game and let the driver setting handle the ceiling, because some in-game implementations add their own buffering or quietly enable triple buffering. They also note the exception. A few games only sync when their own option is on, so if you see tearing with driver V-Sync on, try the in-game switch before you assume something is broken.

The same guide’s settings page says to use “Fullscreen” or “Exclusive Fullscreen” for DX11 or older, and for DX12 to use “Borderless” or “Borderless Windowed” mode, “which is equivalent to legacy ‘Fullscreen’ mode”; the DX12 vs DX11 page covers why those two render paths behave differently in the first place.

Windows

Windows has no V-Sync switch of its own. What it has is a Variable refresh rate toggle under Settings > System > Display > Graphics, inside the Advanced graphics settings group on my Windows 11 build, where its help text reads “Get higher frame rates and help reduce screen tearing in games that don’t support this by default.” Microsoft’s DirectX team describes it as a way to give VRR to “DX11 full-screen games that did not support VRR natively,” and says it “doesn’t override any of the settings you’ve already configured in the G-SYNC, FreeSync, or Adaptive-Sync control panels.” Microsoft lists the requirements as Windows version 1903 or later, a G-SYNC, FreeSync or Adaptive-Sync capable monitor, and a WDDM 2.6 or newer driver that supports the feature, and says the toggle is off by default and can be turned on in Graphics settings once those are met. The same Windows page carries Optimizations for windowed games, whose help text on my machine reads “Reduce latency and use advanced features in compatible games by using flip presentation model.” I leave it on.

What I measured and what the cited tests show

What is first-party here is the configuration. I verified the menu paths, the option names and the state of my own switches on the bench machine described in the methodology note at the bottom of this page, and the whole setup runs a 7800X3D and RTX 5080 into the AORUS FO48U at 120 Hz. I have not measured input latency. That measurement needs a 1000 fps camera pointed at the screen and a mouse wired to an LED, and Blur Busters did exactly that.

Their G-SYNC 101 test used a Casio Exilim EX-ZR200 at 1000 fps, a Razer DeathAdder Chroma modified with an external LED, an Acer Predator XB252Q 240 Hz G-Sync display, a GTX 1080 on driver 381.78, and Overwatch and CS:GO at lowest settings; the methodology page puts the total at “42 scenarios, 508 runs, and 5080 individual samples.” The hardware is old. The mechanism is not. The syncing behaviour they measured is a property of the driver and the display pipeline, and in the comment thread under the guide its author answered a reader running a 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 with the same recommendations. The numbers that decide the table above:

A frame of delay is worth 16.6 ms at 60 Hz, 8.3 ms at 120 Hz, 6.9 ms at 144 Hz and 4.2 ms at 240 Hz. The same “two frames” of V-Sync lag hurts four times as much at 60 Hz as at 240 Hz.
Double-buffered V-Sync typically adds two frames of delay above the refresh rate, and Overwatch showed up to three and a half frames even with Reduced Buffering on; the methodology page puts that at “up to 58.1ms of additional input lag” at 60 Hz and “up to 14.7ms” at 240 Hz.
Their optimal settings are G-Sync on, driver Vertical Sync on, in-game V-Sync off, and a limiter set at least 3 fps under refresh: 57 at 60 Hz, 97 at 100 Hz, 117 at 120 Hz, 141 at 144 Hz.
With Reflex on in a supported game, the engine limits the frame rate for you when G-Sync and driver V-Sync are on; their Optimal Settings page lists the limit as roughly 116 fps at 120 Hz, 138 at 144 Hz and 224 at 240 Hz.

Their author summed up the ladder for a fixed 60 fps game on a 240 Hz panel in one comment, and I would put it on a poster: sync off and V-Sync off tears and has the lowest latency; G-Sync on with V-Sync off can tear and is second; G-Sync on with V-Sync on cannot tear and has the lowest tear-free latency; and running the panel at 60 Hz to match is the worst option of all.

How it interacts with the other switches

G-Sync and FreeSync. The setup steps, the cap table by refresh rate and the Fast Sync and Enhanced Sync alternatives are in the screen tearing guide. This page decides the switch; that one fixes the symptom.

Max Frame Rate and Reflex. NVIDIA’s support page describes Max Frame Rate as the tool for staying “within the Variable Refresh Rate range” and, for the smoothest tear-free result, says to “turn VSYNC on” alongside it. In the NVIDIA App it sits in the same Global Settings list as Vertical Sync. In the same comment thread, jorimt ranks the render-queue options as Reflex first, then a manual cap that keeps GPU usage below 99 percent, then Low Latency Mode Ultra, then On.

Frame generation. Blur Busters’ author says his VRR recommendations “remain unchanged with or without FG.” Generated frames still need to stay inside the VRR window, and frame generation explained covers the latency floor that comes with them. On the AMD side, the HAGS page notes GPUOpen’s warning that disabling hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling “may result in more tearing” with FSR 3, so leave HAGS on before you blame V-Sync for tearing in a frame-generated game.

Low GPU usage and stutter. V-Sync on makes the GPU coast once it reaches the refresh rate, which is the single most common false alarm in the low GPU usage diagnosis; a card sitting at 60 percent while the game holds 120 fps on a 120 Hz panel is behaving. The reverse case, a frame rate that swings across the refresh rate with V-Sync on, shows up as the range-exceed stutter described in the stuttering guide, and the cap is the fix there too.

Coil whine. A GPU rendering 400 fps in a menu is the classic coil-whine trigger, and V-Sync or a cap is the first thing the coil whine guide tells you to try. Resizable BAR is the other “on or off” question people ask in the same breath; it has nothing to do with sync and stays on.

The bottom line

Decide by monitor, then by game. On a VRR display the switch is a safety net. Driver V-Sync on, in-game off, cap under refresh, and G-Sync or FreeSync does the real work with essentially no latency cost. On a fixed-refresh display it is a straight trade of tearing for lag. Off when reaction time matters, on when the picture matters, and off again the moment your frame rate falls below the refresh rate. On a Radeon card the driver switch only touches OpenGL, so make the choice in the game’s own menu. Then stop fiddling.

If the tearing is still there after all that, the problem is the setup, and the screen tearing guide walks it from VRR down to the last resort.

Sources

NVIDIA Control Panel Help, Manage 3D Settings (reference), Vertical sync entry: https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en-us/mergedProjects/nv3d/Manage_3D_Settings_(reference).htm
NVIDIA, 007 First Light GeForce Game Ready Driver Released (May 26, 2026; Control Panel retirement notice): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/007-first-light-geforce-game-ready-driver/
NVIDIA, Adaptive VSync technology page (frame-rate lock to 45 or 30 fps below the cap): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/adaptive-vsync/technology/
NVIDIA Support, Max Frame Rate: Cap Frame Rates, Save Power, and More: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4958
Blur Busters, G-SYNC 101: Control Panel; Input Lag & Test Methodology; Optimal G-SYNC Settings & Conclusion: https://blurbusters.com/gsync/gsync101-input-lag-tests-and-settings/
Blur Busters, G-SYNC 101 comment thread, replies by the author jorimt (the lowest-latency ladder, the LLM ranking, the frame-generation note): https://blurbusters.com/gsync/gsync101-input-lag-tests-and-settings/14/#comment-16319
AMD GPUOpen, FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (the HAGS-disabled tearing note cited via the HAGS page): https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-super-resolution-3/
AMD Support DH-012, Configure AMD Radeon Settings for Ultimate Gaming Experience (Wait for Vertical Refresh values and the OpenGL-only note): https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH-012.html
AMD Support DH3-012, Customize Graphics Settings with AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition (updated March 3, 2025): https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-012.html
Microsoft DirectX Developer Blog, OS Variable Refresh Rate: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/os-variable-refresh-rate/
Microsoft Support, Change the refresh rate on your monitor in Windows (Settings > System > Display > Advanced display): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/display-graphics/change-the-refresh-rate-on-your-monitor-in-windows

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