Are you west coast? Somewhere else?

Compared to what- m1? So m1 and m2 use the same 5nm process, but m2 had small evolutionary improvements https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/apple-m2-vs-m1

M3 has been another fairly substantial leap forward. I got an m3 MacBook last week and I’m seeing insane speed ups over my octo-core i9 it’s replacing, especially for heavy compute tasks like video encoding and ML workloads while generating next to no heat, rarely any fans at all, and an crazy battery life. Generating stable diffusion images went from about a minute to 5 seconds, handbrake encodes went from about 35fps to 196. I fired up steam and gamed for 4 or 5 hours and barely used 25% of the battery. 95% of the tasks I do don’t even turn on the fans, totally silent passive cooling most of the time. The whole thing is barely warm on my lap.

Now, my i9 on the other hand was a lap burner that had two fan settings: annoying and holy hell.

7nm, that’s cute. TSMC is targeting 2025 for their 2nm process.

I mean, cudos to them for participating in the arms race, but again, M3s are shipping right now, not in 6 months, and judging by the only 11 month window between m2 and m3, we’ll see another bump from Apple next year too. Further, the articles goes on and on about how the 80watt TDP isn’t for the chip but the whole system but then also points out that no one knows the power draw of the chip at all, yet still goes on and on about efficiency.

I’m happy that other chip makers are jumping in the race, even intel has gotten a kick in the pants to stop sitting around releasing high priced garbage because no competition, but all this marketing hype around the X Elite is premature and just a marketing gimmick to try and keep people interested for 6 more months until something finally ships.

Ok but how about apple’s M3? Also, what’s the performance at the same power level?

You cant re-use an old connector, you’ll have to crimp on a new one. It may or may not be worth buying the tool/ends depending on the length of the cable.

You can buy a cable crimper and a bag of the ends on Amazon, prob for $20-$40, but if it’s just one small patch cable you’re trying to fix, you can probably buy that for $5.

I ran Ethernet through my whole house and outside for cameras, so it was worth it to me to buy the tools and spools of cable.

Falling sand games, specter supreme, escape velocity, gyromite.

Quad core atom I believe

Synology- Synology 8 Bay NAS Diskstation… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KMKDW42?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

I have 3 - but I get that runtime out of one of them. Depends on load, but idle the nas doesn’t draw too much.

Well I did buy the last one a couple years ago so that tracks. CCC is absolutely the way to go though, it’s a must. I think I also grabbed one at Costco <$200 at one point.

I have a few cyber power 1000W/1500 VA units. They go on sale for under $150 now and then. Best price/power ratio I’ve found. The battery in one has lasted at least 6 years, other is going strong for at least 2. They’re big enough to power my 8 bay NAS for a couple hours. I don’t recommend DYI for a UPS, too unreliable.

I’m still a fan of synology because it does a lot of what you want out of the box without you needing to constantly manage and setup all these services from scratch. I’ve upgraded through several synology units over the years, currently using a 6TBx8 unit for much of what you mention. Since drives are so big these days, you could get a newer 4bay with more horsepower and just drop a couple 20TB drives in it as a mirrored pair then in the future add more drives as needed. Dropping to 2 drives cuts your power consumption a bit, and staying with a 4 bay instead of something bigger will also keep the power down.

You can absolutely build your own, but synology comes with all the “home cloud” apps preconfigured and your time and effort is worth something too. I build enterprise cloud environments for a living and I don’t want to have to do that at home on my free time- synology is so plug’n’play.

I also recommend a static site builder- you dont have to fuss with database or security, you can host with a simple http server, and it’s easy to work with. Hugo, Jekyll, etc

Nice about the NIC- I’m still on gigabit in the house which is fine- 100ish MBps is fast enough that copying a movie or something is still just a minute or two, but my NAS supports a 10Gb expansion card- I might upgrade one day. I don’t know how much speed I get get through my CAT 6- I haven’t tested above gigabit speeds. Really though I don’t need my LAN to be substantially faster than my internet, so gigabit is fine for the next few years I think.

Is this cable service? Cable often shares capacity with people on your “block” so when everyone is uploading, your upload suffers. I had real trouble with cable a few years ago where intermittently my upload would throttle so hard that tcp acks would fail to send and my download would tank too. FIOS was the best thing that every happened to my internet!

Yeah exactly. Also: there’s more Linux on Azure than windows, and AWS hosts more windows than all of Azure.

In my experience, there’s a reason most things on the internet are not hosted on windows.

That said, you’ll want to look at IIS as a starting point.

Honestly, I think you’d be better served learning/understanding docker and just get that up and running in windows to host stuff instead. Managing windows hosting is a bizarre mix of hoping between quasi gui property windows and control panels.