Well, its been awhile hasn’t it? I meant to do a year end review but you know, Covid… Need I say more?

Anyway this post is more about the project I built over the last few months and my overall current “Tech Setup” for 2021. It isnt to my liking yet but pretty solid if I do say so myself. I actually own technically two PCs. A main PC for every day use and a server for miscellaneous activities which I will go into detail here.

First we’ll talk about my main PC. My everyday PC, the one I’ve dumped probably the most money into at this point, and yet I’m never content with it, but people who own a PC never are so I’m just one of those guys. Any who enough stalling, lets dive in.

First are my monitors I run a triple monitor setup with 1 main 28 inch Asus 4K height adjustable monitor with Freesync, cause I’m a GAMERtm. All jokes aside I was a big skeptic of 1080p VS. 4K monitors and the jump to a higher resolution wasn’t a big deal. Boy was I wrong 1080p VS a 4K screen is a massive jump, pay a bit more, but definitely worth it in my opinion if you care any little bit about image quality. To round out my monitor setup I have 2 Asus 1080p monitos both at 24 inches respectively. As a person who has worked both with single and multi monitor setups, once you have multiple monitors, just to multitask, it’s nearly impossuble to go back to a single monitor setup.

Next come the internals of my PC:

CASE Corsair Carbide Mid Tower Case

CPU: i7-8700k overclocked to 4.8 GHz

Motherboard: ASUS PRIME Z390-A

RAM: 16 GB Corsair Vengeance 2133

GPU: Asus ROG Strix 8 GB 2080 (Still wanting to upgrade to a 3080 or the rumored TI variant or a 3090 eventually, for the ULTIMATE GAMING EXPERIENCE, fpr Emulators! also screw scalpers)

HDDs:

M.2 PATRIOT 256 GB (Win10 OS Only) (Never going back to HDDs or an SSD for an OS Drive)

x3 Seagate 1 TB HDDs for Applications, Non Network Storage Games (LOOKING AT YOU UBISOFT), and Stream/Twitch Things

PCIe Cards: Elgato HD60 Pro 1080 Capture Card

PSU 1000 Watt EVGA Supernova 80+ Gold

That pretty much covers the internal parts of importance, next come the peripherals, sweet

Mouse: Razer Naga Chroma 12 Button Mouse (You know when I finally play an MMO)

Keyboard: Razer Naga Chroma BlackWidow V2 (Cause RGB please)

Webcam: Victure SC30 1080 Webcam

My main rig is good by today’s standards just never quite to my liking.

All in all it plays most AAA titles at 4k60 or 4K30 fine just with some exceptions otherwise a real solid machine/

The actual project I alluded to earlier was completed about a month ago now and it’s more designed for a home-lab for experiments and just learning new tech and skills and this is where my computer science degree comes into play. This build is also probably more of an all purpose server than a home-lab but has home-lab uses. Specs for it are below and will go more into detail of the build and its uses:

Case: Fractal Node 804 Micro Atx Case

Motherboard: B460-PRIME-A Asus Motherboard MicroATX

CPU: i7-10700 Clocked at 3.6 GHz 8 Core/16 Threads

RAM: 128 GB Corsair Vengeance 32×4 2666

HDDs: x1 Sandisk 480 GB SSD (Proxmox OS)

x8 10 TB Seagate IronWolf Pros (4 Raid 1 Storage Pools of 10 TB Each)

PCIe Cards: 8 Port SATA 6GB Card

PSU: 750 Watt EVGA Supernova 80+ Gold

That’s right I have a MicroATX server with 80 TB of storage, about 40 after RAID 1 storage pool provisioning. I have 4 of those set up within Proxmox. One for Steam games that can run off Network Attached Storage (NAS) One for Plex for all the anime I own, along with movies and Linux ISOs ^_*.

Third pool is more for Virtual Machines and Containers for homelab stuff. They are as below:

Container: Debian 9 Turnkey File Server (So I can make File Shares for Steam and Plex respectively

Virtual Machines: Nextcloud (Opensource personal Google Drive/Dropbox Application) Run Off Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Plex: For watching my personal collection of anime, movies, TV Shows and Linux ISOs

Kali: The Offensive Security Debian Linux Distro for malware analysis and overall learning of cyber security topics.

The fourth pool is left unused for now as I don’t know what I’ll use it for.

Did I go way overboard with the server? Probably. Am I happy with it? Yes. This gives me plenty of storage as well as plenty of resources to learn new things and spin up tons of Virtual Machines and Containers in the future if I want to try something new or need something for fun.

Anyway that’s my project and setup for 2021 as it sits now.

Let me of anything with the server I should try out application wise that sounds fun or worthwhile to check out. Always open to learning new things, especially in Cyber Security. Let me know in the comments

Let me know your builds too!

I leave you with my cable management skills (Pre current server build)

Until Next Time!

~Ryan