Crap, you are right, units should be in Wh not W/h and as I result I put the conversion to hours backwards. Well, that turns the whole thing from an impressive amount of energy to basically none!

Edit 2: Eheran pointed out I screwed up the math. Correct total energy output is 13μWh. A very, very, very small amount of energy.

(2x10¹⁵ W) * (25s/1x10¹⁸) * (1 h/ 3600 s) = 13μWh

Previous bad math:

It’s a very old 1080p Sharp TV. I know it does have WiFi which I have not setup, but that certainly doesn’t mean the WiFi is off.

I’ll have to see if there is some way to disable the WiFi completely and re-measure it.

The Germans visibly laughed when they were warned of such a dependence on Russia in 2018. For some reason, they didn’t find such a poor decision to be of concern.

As a comparison, France has invested heavily in nuclear and the Nordic countries heavily on renewables.

The UPS should have a USB plug in the back. Plug that into your computer and it will read the battery status as if it was a laptop. Then in your OS, set the standard shutdown options when low on battery.

especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC

I still giggle that after years and years of Halo 3+ being a console exclusive, and Halo 2 sucking on Windows for years*, the entire Halo collection now has a Gold rating on Linux. I have very specific memories of being annoyed for years that the most prestigious Microsoft game doesn’t work on a Microsoft gaming platform (Windows).

*God damn does Games for Windows Live suck

A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed you can run it and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).

The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won’t boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won’t use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.

If you don’t already own one, a Kill-A-Watt is a great tool to have. Tells you how much energy a device is using. Biggest thing I found was my TV had a vampire draw of 15W. Literally draws 15W while off. This got the TV put on a power strip I turn off when I’m not using it.

Now, with all that said, sometimes you just want what you want. And there is nothing wrong with that. My goal here is to make sure you don’t feel you have to pick one option over the other.

If you have a desktop, throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Software (like you mentioned Plex or Jellyfin) does the rest. Even if you only have a laptop, a hard drive in a standard USB enclosure will perform this role just fine.

Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn’t an issue.

What are you intending to run on this server?

• If it is just PiHole, you can basically get the weakest computer you can find.

• If you want lots of storage space, you will need to make sure you have a case and motherboard that will accommodate the drives.

• If you are running encryption on those drives as well, you will need a CPU more powerful than what comes in a Pi, but nothing crazy.

• If you are running lots and lots of VMs, you will want lots of RAM. A linux VM will use maybe a few GB each depending on what software each is running internally, a windows vm will use a bit more.

• If you are doing AI workloads, you will need a graphics card.

Ah, only the dozenth time this has happened and been fixed…

I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t do it on purpose all the time!

Exactly, that information isn’t coming from inside the black hole. In fact it is the lack of information that tells us such things. We know the ratio between the lack of information (the event horizon) and the mass of everything inside.

Mother of the year.

Your bank almost certainly has a way to mail checks on a schedule.

Autopay is the way.

Yeah, Texas defending privacy rights in undeniably a good thing.

Yeah, it’s pretty annoying. Best thing you can do do is sub to communities that don’t have it. As an example, the linux communities are pretty big and low on politics.

Yeah, it’s why I stopped using Amazon Glacier years ago and use ProtonDrive now. The actual storage costs are pretty reasonable, but if you ever want to download your data, shit gets very expensive very fast.

Growing up impoverished certainly teaches one poor lessons for how to get out of poverty; however people have the ability to learn and modify their behavior. Helping one modify their behavior in positive ways must be encouraged as it is one of the ways out of the cycle.

Those are both solid pieces of hardware. However, I would suggest getting a Ryzen 5600 for a notable per-core CPU buff over the 3600x, which should help quite a bit with games like Civ’s AI turn time. And since that CPU, Motherboard socket isn’t latest-gen either, you can buy used for cheap still.

Ryzen 3600x vs Ryzen 5600.

On a slightly different note: The 7k series Ryzen CPUs get you on the latest slot, AM5. This will get you future upgradability if you want it, but it will also come with higher costs as AM5 is the newest socket, so people aren’t unloading them onto the used market in quantity. Such cost considerations are best determined by you. Both are a solid choice though.

For the GPU, I think the Radeon 6600 is a good choice. Radeon stuff works better in linux and that particular one is plenty strong for what you listed.

I highly, highly recommend PassMark’s benchmarks for comparing hardware. They are the first place I look to get relative numbers. And from there I determine what I need/want.

Single-thread CPU chart

GPU Chart