New Setup

[Webzcas]

As my son started a game development course in September and ideally needs a gaming rig at home I have come up with a neat solution, which means I don't need to find £1,500 or thereabouts down the side of the sofa to spend begrudgingly on a Windows PC.

So I have said goodbye to my beautiful 27 2020 iMac, which is powered by a 10th Generation i7 running at 3.8ghz with 8 cores, a dedicated AMD Radeon Pro XT with 8GB of memory and upgraded DD4 2666MHZ memory to the tune of 96GB. Not forgetting the amazing 5K display that 27' iMacs are renowned for.

It has been wiped, bootcamp setup and Windows 10 installed. Along with Photoshop, Blender and Unreal Engine.

It I am happy to say flies and is so much quicker than the 2015 15' MacBook I got for him a few months ago. Which I have requisitioned, reinstalled MacOS Monterey on it and it is now my second screen / machine. So I have this plus my 14 M2 Pro MacBook Pro. Early days, but I am actually ok with losing the screen real estate of the iMac.

My son's desk in his room

My new office setup

 

[Webzcas]

Rather than start a new thread, thought I would update this one instead. Over the past couple of weeks I have made some changes to my office. Previously I was only able to get approx 300mbps download on my Macbook over wifi, plus as my NAS was running out of space I spent a lot of time looking for a new model.

Finally went with the UGreen DXP 4800 - a four bay nas, with an Intel N100 and 8GB of DDR 5 memory, plus it comes with space for 2 NVME M.2 SSD drives, memory expandable to 16GB and more importantly two, 2.5gig network cards.

So, I have purchased a TP Link 2.5gig unmanaged switch. Placed my old ASUS Wifi Router as an AI Mesh node in my office and got a usb c --> 2.5gig ethernet connector for my main macbook.

Result is, I now have a 2.5gig LAN, with read and write speeds for large files of approx 250MB/s. My internet connection from my main macbook thanks to the asus aimesh mode in the office, is consistently over 600mbps download.

The NAS is also setup as a media server running Jellyfin, so able to stream movies to multiple devices simultaneously.

Configured in RAID 5 using four 4TB Toshiba N300 drives, connected to a neat APC UPS, oh and have a removable usb c 8TB Seagate Drive for backups

 

[satchnz]

I bought a base Mac Mini M4 a few months ago. My existing mini windows PC used for slots and light gaming was getting a bit long in the tooth, and the value of the Mac Mini M4 was hard to pass up. My partner had to move to a MacBook Pro for work not long before that so I had to learn macOS anyway to answer her inevitable questions…

Coming from having used Windows from Windows 3.1 through to Windows 11, there sure are a bunch of really niggly things with MacOS! But it’s handy to have integration with my other Apple devices.

One issue I’m having is while playing slots. After a while, the animations periodically become choppy (e.g. the reels spinning in). This never happened on my Windows machine and is bugging me as I cannot resolve it.

I’m not fully sold on it yet, but it’s what I have for now.

 

[Webzcas]

I love the fact that MacOs is basically built on linux and homebrew is excellent. 2015 was when I migrated from Windows and I have not looked back. Windows 7 was IMO the last half decent Windows OS, that and XP imo.

 

[Webzcas]

So just spent a long weekend based in Copenhagen and also took a day trip on Saturday just gone to Sweden. Love the fact my phone automatically backs up all newly taken photos to my NAS when I got back home.

All photos sorted by date and also location

 

[slaman29]

Nice setup Google deleted all my history of past 15 years recently, it was quite weird to see a lot of history and pics all on the map. The the warning came and I decided to allow it. Nice to have a clean map and no more pics after a while

 

[Webzcas]

I have nearly 20 years worth of pictures and videos, which I will never leave at the mercy of a cloud provider - which is in essence somebody else’s computer.

With my new setup, I have nearly 11TB of storage in raid 5, thus providing redundancy for one drive failure.

Additionally this is backed up nightly to an external Seagate Drive. Which is swapped out each month with another Seagate external drive I keep 2 miles away at our secure storage unit.

 

[Webzcas]

I have a new addition to the office, in the form of my very own headless AI Server.

Welcome to my M3 Ultra Mac Studio!!!

Had it a week now and woah! Blown away!

 

[Jono777]

Probably not the ideal response from me but LOVE the Pacman thing-y-ma-bob

 

[Webzcas]

Probably not the ideal response from me but LOVE the Pacman thing-y-ma-bob

Yeah so do I

Will be a sad day when the leds stop working!