Butter, What?!

How Is Pat Using Machine Learning At The End Of 2025?

2025-12-02T09:00:00-06:00

I considered holding off until the start of 2026 to write this blog post, but there is a good chance that the LLM landscape will have evolved a lot by the time we get to March or April. The end of the year feels like a better anchor on the calendar, with the current pace of machine learning.

I don’t heavily use any machine-learning tools, and I am most definitely not a professional programmer. I might write something approaching 10,000 words every month. You’ll probably giggle at what I have been doing if you’re already a mile deep into integrating AI into your workflow.

I suspect that you’ll find something useful here if you haven’t begun using any AI tools, or if you’ve also only barely scratched the surface.

Tools like OpenCode and Claude Code aren’t just for programmers!

This seems like a good point to mention that I have started relying on OpenCode and my $6 per month Z.ai Coding Lite subscription. Yes. That is my referral link. I will get some small amount of credit if you subscribe, and I believe you will get 10% off your first payment.

I avoided Claude Code for a long time. I sit down to write code once or twice a month, so I didn’t think it was worth $17 a month for such occasional use. It really was a no-brainer to try out Z.ai’s subscription for $3 per month. I can easily get $3 of value out of OpenCode every month, and a year of subscription costs about the same as two months of Claude Code.

I already wrote an entire blog post about Z.ai’s Coding Lite plan, so I’m not going to say much more here. I am using it with OpenCode, but you can just as easily plumb that subscription into the Claude Code client.

I am so glad I subscribed, because that is how I learned that tools like OpenCode work great when writing blog posts with Markdown.

I can ask OpenCode to check my grammar. It will show me where I made mistakes, and I can ask OpenCode to apply all or just some of the changes for me. I can ask OpenCode to add links from older blog posts to the post I am working on, and it will do it in the same style that I normally would.

I can also ask OpenCode to write a conclusion section for the blog post I am currently editing. I’ve been having LLMs do this for me for a while now. I never use the whole thing, but it is nice to have a little jump start on the job, and the robot usually says something kind that I wouldn’t ever say about my own work. I enjoy being able to leave one of those nice bits in.

These are things I could always do with a chat interface, but OpenCode edits my file in place. I don’t have to paste the blog post into another window. I don’t have to select text and ask Emacs to send it to a service. OpenCode finds the relevant files, sends the appropriate text up to GLM-4.6, and it makes the necessary changes on its own.

It saves me some time. It saves me some effort. Best of all, it is finally doing some of the more monotonous work for me. I don’t want the machines writing blog posts for me.

I don’t write code often, but I do write code sometimes!

I have been using OpenRouter’s chat playground for most of the last year. Talking about chat interfaces is going to be in the next section, but I feel like this is a good point to mention my spending. I put $10 into my OpenRouter account 11 months ago, and it took that entire 11 months to whittle away nearly 50 cents of those credits using the chat interface.

One day of light coding with OpenCode ate up an entire dollar. Not a lot of money, but more money spent in a single day that I had spent in the previous 11 months. I don’t think my coding load would ever add up to a significant fraction of a Claude Code subscription, but one dollar was a big enough percentage of a Z.ai Coding Plan subscription to make me set up a quarterly subscription.

OpenCode is meant for writing code. It does a great job at that, even if I am a light user and don’t ask it for much. The only proper story that I have is a repeat from my post over at patshead.com. I asked OpenCode to make the sequential build script for my OpenSCAD gaming mouse project into a more parallel build process.

This cut my build time for all the mice down from around 5 minutes to just 45 seconds, but the process took quite a few steps. Some of those steps were my fault, because I kept asking for more just because I could. Some of those extra steps were due to the LLM goobering things up.

I got to a point where things were almost working, but the STL files weren’t actually being built. OpenCode figured out how to run my build script, it figured out where new STL and 3MF files were supposed to be showing up, and it iterated quite a few times before figuring out that it accidentally added an extra layer of quotes in the OpenSCAD commands.

I had to nudge OpenCode along a few times, because it didn’t know my build script only builds 3D-printable files for source code files that have changed since their output files were last built. I should probably be including this sort of information in an agents.md file.

This is where tools that run themselves really start to cost money. If I remember what was on the billing dashboard correctly, I burned through something around a million free input tokens that day. That would have been enough tokens at OpenRouter to cost me as much as my Z.ai subscription.

I’m ready for local LLMs, but I don’t have a good use case yet

I have been experimenting. I can run a simple speech-to-text model, a simple text-to-speech model, and a small 2B LLM on the N100 mini PC server in my homelab. That little machine has enough horsepower to respond to a voice query like, “How is the weather today?” about as fast as my Google Home Mini, but I didn’t attempt to plumb that into the Internet so it could answer correctly. That was enough to tell me that it won’t require expensive hardware to get a useful voice interface going for Home Assistant.

I have been messing around with what sort of models might fit on my 16 GB Radeon 9070 XT. I learned that I can squeeze Gemma 3 4B at Q6 along with its vision component and 4,000 tokens of context into 6 GB of VRAM. That means I could run this on a used $75 8 GB Radeon RX580 GPU in my homelab and send it photos of my front porch and ask, “Is there a package on the porch?” That could also be the model that Home Assistant’s voice interface could rely on. There might even be enough VRAM left over to fit both a text-to-speech and a speech-to-text model!

📦[pat@almalinux-rocm llama.cpp]$ ./build/bin/llama-bench -m ./models/Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -d 16000 --flash-attn 1
ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_MMQ:    no
ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_CUBLAS: no
ggml_cuda_init: found 1 ROCm devices:
  Device 0: AMD Radeon Graphics, gfx1201 (0x1201), VMM: no, Wave Size: 32
| model                          |       size |     params | backend    | ngl | fa |            test |                  t/s |
| ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | --: | -: | --------------: | -------------------: |
| mistral3 14B Q4_K - Medium     |   7.78 GiB |    13.51 B | ROCm       |  99 |  1 |  pp512 @ d16000 |       606.28 ± 94.39 |
| mistral3 14B Q4_K - Medium     |   7.78 GiB |    13.51 B | ROCm       |  99 |  1 |  tg128 @ d16000 |         43.34 ± 0.03 |

build: 61bde8e21 (7240)
📦[pat@almalinux-rocm llama.cpp]$ 

16K is more context than I would need for blogging, and Mistral 3 processes prompts three times as fast with a 4K context window, but I was hoping to see how it might manage being called from OpenCode!

I have used older local models for help writing blog posts, and they have been more than up to the task for a long time. I can run a model like Gemma 3 12B on my GPU, and it would be almost as capable for this task as any paid model from 18 months ago.

I have been hoping I could squeeze a smart enough model to use with OpenCode onto my GPU, but you really need a minimum of 16,000 tokens of context, and I regularly push up queries that are into the 30,000 token range. The smallest and barely usable agentic coding models CAN be squeezed onto my 16 GB GPU, but they won’t leave enough room for context.

I learned from my testing with OpenRouter that I wouldn’t want to try coding with anything less than Qwen Coder 30B A3B. That requires a minimum of a GPU with 32 GB of VRAM, or a $2,100 Ryzen AI Max 395 mini-PC. The former would be fast but tight, the latter would be slower, roomier, and more expensive.

But the fact is that even if I could run Qwen 30B A3B locally, I’d still prefer to use GLM-4.6 in the cloud. Running GLM-4.6 through my Z.ai subscription is faster, costs pocket change, and the model is 15 times bigger. It would still be cheaper than buying a beefy GPU for me to pay by the token for even faster responses from GLM-4.6 hosted by Cerebras.

Should You Run A Large Language Model On An Intel N100 Mini PC?

Having a chat interface available is useful

I used OpenRouter’s chat playground for the majority of the last year. They let you configure little assistants that point to different models, and OpenRouter has a vast array of models to choose from at all sorts of different price points.

The trouble I had with OpenRouter’s web interface revolved around organization. My saved chats would sort of go missing, or they would get gummed up by future chats. I just wanted to have configured places to start a fresh chat about coding or about blogging that started from a known place, but my interface kept getting filled up with useless history. It just isn’t made to be organized.

I wound up installing LobeChat locally and pointing it at OpenRouter’s API. LobeChat let me set up coding and blogging assistants with their own system prompts. The coding chat uses Qwen Coder 480B with a coding-friendly system prompt, and my blogging chats use GPT-OSS-120B or DeepSeek V3.2. Mostly the latter, but I was curious how well GPT-OSS would do, because that is a model I could conceivably run on a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC.

LobeChat doesn’t lose my assistants. It keeps separate collections of chat history under each agent, so all my blogging jibber jabber stays in one place. It has been a nice upgrade.

I definitely find myself using OpenCode way more often than a chat interface, but I am glad I have chat available. Sometimes you have a simple problem, and you don’t want to wait for OpenCode to collect context from multiple files, send 25,000 tokens up to the LLM, and then possibly wait for two or three round trips to the LLM in the background.

Sometimes you just need a simple function to do a simple thing, and the chat interface will give it to you in three seconds.

LobeChat on Github

I am also using AI image and video generation in the cloud

I was generating images locally on my 12 GB Radeon 6700 XT in the earlier days of Stable Diffusion. I would make goofy but relevant pictures to break up long stretches of words in blog posts. I’d just have Stable Diffusion run through a matrix of LORAs, and it would generate around 600 pictures in the ten minutes it would take for me to make a latte in the kitchen. Then I’d grab one or two of the best to use in a blog.

I have been using Runware.ai’s playground to generate images even since Flux came out. Flux was too big and too slow to run well on my GPU, but it also does a much better job of adhering to the prompt, so I don’t need to generate hundreds of pictures anymore. Runware gives me a good photo in a few seconds, and I can even pass any images I like back through Flux Kontext to make minor tweaks or even add my own face to the images.

I only use Runware’s video generators for fun. I usually put myself into a pizza situation to announce Butter, What?! pizza night. I don’t have much use for short videos in my blogs!

Runware’s pricing is great. Images usually cost me a fraction of a penny, and short videos cost somewhere between a few pennies and a few nickels.

Conclusion

I hope that what I have written here backs up my early statement that I am a fairly light user of machine learning. At the same time, I hope that this demonstrates that there are useful things you could be doing while only scratching the surface.

The tools I’ve mentioned here have saved me time and effort, even with my modest usage patterns. Even better, some of the tasks they are handling for me are boring and mundane, so they are exactly the sort of jobs I don’t want to have to do myself!

What AI tools are you using in your workflow? Are you also a light user who’s found some clever ways to integrate machine learning into your daily tasks? Come share your experiences and ask questions over in our Discord community. We would love to hear what you’re working on!

We Had A Booth At Texas Linux Fest 2025!

2025-10-07T01:00:00-05:00

I have to tell you that we didn’t expect to get much traffic at our little table at Texas Linux Fest. We’re just a couple of guys who brought a 3D printer competing with big companies like Rackspace and Framework for eyeballs, and Framework has those really cool laptops that everyone got to put their hands on! We also dragged our friends Mike and James along to help us hold down the fort, and they did a fantastic job.

There were some slow periods when the talks were full, but had at least one person chatting with most of the time we were there, and we had people waiting in line to see what was going on more than a few times!

Post by @briancmoses@hachyderm.io

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Brian and I talked to so many people. I remember so many excellent conversations. I remember quite a few names. I am realizing that I didn’t necessarily do a good job of properly connecting the triplet of names, faces, and conversations correctly in my head. It was just too many things to keep track of over the span of two days!

I was excited that we weren’t there to sell anything. Though Brian does stock the nifty low-power NAS-focused motherboard that was part of the giveaway in his eBay store, most of what we talked about wound up focused much more heavily on the 3D-printing aspect of things. I think that motherboard is right in the sweet spot for a home server, but I only heard Brian mention that you could buy one from him twice, and it was only after he got prodded pretty hard on the motherboard specs and availability.

The DIY NAS giveaway was a huge success!

It was both a success because someone got to walk away with a 3D-printed NAS, and also because Brian said it was the most fun he’s ever had giving away a NAS. He has given away quite a few over the last decade, too!

Brian printed makerunit’s 6-bay NAS case from Printables. He modified it slightly to replace makerunit’s logo with a Texas Linux Fest logo, and Brian printed the case in the Texas Linux Fest colors.

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Brian didn’t fill any of the 3.5” bays, but there is room for six hard drives, so the winner could cram this full with up to 180 terabytes of raw storage. He did load the Intel N150 motherboard with 32 gigabytes of RAM, a 256-gigabyte NVMe for the boot drive, and a 4-terabyte NVMe for storage, and that awesome little motherboard has a pair of 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports and even a 10-gigabit Ethernet port.

Most attendees were software developers?!

Listen. I haven’t been to a Linux conference since going to a couple of LinuxWorld Expos around 2001 and 2002. The vast majority of vendors showing off their stuff back then was targeted at system admins: servers with Linux pre-installed, RAID controllers with good Linux support, or server monitoring and administration software. That sort of stuff.

I don’t have formal metrics on this, but I feel like the vast majority of people we chatted with over the weekend were software developers. I would probably say that coding is my weakest area within the range of skills that were relevant to the people who might attend Texas Linux Fest, but most of the friendly people we talked to have an equivalent hole in their knowledge when it comes to server hardware and things closer to the bare metal.

This photo with me right in the center of the frame claims it was taken at LinuxWorld Expo in New York in 2022

It was fun to learn about things where I have gaps in my knowledge, especially where I’ve gotten more and more outdated as I don’t do any of this stuff as a day job anymore. It was equally enjoyable being able to fill in the gaps that other people have.

At one point we had five or six people crowded around in front of our table, most of whom seems to be developers–I didn’t ask was every single person does for their day job! It has been a long time since I’ve participated in a conversation like this with so many smart people.

It felt like we were almost going around in a circle. Everybody had something to contribute. I think even the smartest of us, which almost definitely wasn’t me, managed to learn something.

It wasn’t all just extreme tech jibber jabber!

We had more than a few people stop by to chat with us about the 3D printers they already own. It was fun getting to show off the sort of features every Bambu Lab or current generation Prusa printer have compared to their older printers from the Ender 3 days. We might have ran a dozen print jobs over two days on my Bambu A1 Mini without a single failure.

We also talked to more than a few people who were interested in buying a 3D printer, but they haven’t had the confidence to pull the trigger. Most people were surprised at the price and capabilities of the little printer I brought with me, and I got to let a few people kick off a fresh print job just to see how easy it can be. I feel like we gave everyone some solid advice.

Some people asked about 3D modeling for 3D printing. When people asked me this at our local makerspace, most of them looked at me like I was out of my mind when I explained how I use OpenSCAD for my 3D-modeling needs. Most of the people I talked to at Texas Linux Fest were coders. Usually their faces perked up at least a bit when I explained how OpenSCAD creates models from diffs and unions of shapes like cubes and cylinders, and how you can use loops and conditionals to place those shapes.

Mike and I chatted with Brett about 3D printing for his retro-computing project, which may or may not have revolved around their Commodore VIC-20 or a yet to be purchased Commodore PET.

I chatted with someone who was working to open a community center in rural El Salvador. He was asking about 3D printing in relation to that, and he was very interested to learn that soda bottles can easily be converted into reasonably decent 3D-printing filament. I pointed him towards CNC Kitchen’s video about inexpensively converting bottles to PET filament.

The Bambu A1 - Do I Regret Buying an A1 Mini a Month Ago?

There were some awesome talks, but I didn’t manage to get to any of them!

I probably should have set some alarms to make sure I would make it to at least one talk, but we wound up being pretty busy. I did a bad job.

I don’t know if I should tell you this, because I don’t want to accidentally disrespect anyone, but I picked the two talks that I WANTED to attend based almost entirely on the headshots of the speakers. I picked the ones that looked like they had the least corporate photos!

I was interested in Sophia Solomon’s Grep Can’t Help You Now: Observability for LLMs talk, and Willard Nilges’s Lessons Learned Building Observability for a Non-Profit. I picked Sophia’s talk because she looked friendly, and I enjoyed that she was showing us a 3D-printed Flexi Rex.

I was amazed that one of the first people to stop by our booth was Willard, so I at least got to tell him that I was planning to go listen to what he had to say!

I don’t know how I didn’t picked Joshua Lee’s Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores. His headshot is awesome, and it is for sure not in the standard corporate style. We did get to hang out with Joshua before his talk, and we spoke about a lot of cool things! I also heard from our friend James that Josh’s talk was fantastic.

We also made a new friend when Swetha Garaga stopped by our table to chat with us about 3D printing before her gave her talk titled Human‑Centered Automation: Equity and Efficiency in Modern Warehousing. Swetha was a delight, and I definitely hope everything went smooth for her!

The talks are all being processed and uploaded to the Texas Linux Fest YouTube channel, but I can’t link to the talks I mentioned above. They haven’t been uploaded just yet!

We missed the afterparty!

Meta, a.k.a. the Facebook and Instagram company, was buying the drinks Lavaca Street Bar just a few minutes drive from the venue. Brian is an old man, so he wanted to take a break after dinner. I am also an old man, and my social batteries were almost as drained as Brian’s, and my throat was starting to get a little coughy by the end or each day, so I probably shouldn’t be hollering at people in a noisy bar.

Hopefully we’ll make it to the afterparty next year, and you can join us in spending Meta’s money on alcohol. I don’t know that Meta will be footing this particular bill next year, but one can hope!

Texas Linux Fest 2026?!

I’ve manned more than one booth in my day, but they always had a narrow focus. The things that sit under the Butter, What?! umbrella are fairly diverse, and there was only a thin thread connecting us from Linux to the 3D-printed NAS to the 3D printer that we brought.

I think we learned a lot, and I am certain we will do a better job when Texas Linux Fest rolls around again. We are told that it is tentatively scheduled for November 6 and 7 or 2025, so I hope you keep your calendars open around that time so you can stop by and see us!

We have already had a few people that we met at our booth join our friendly Discord community. If you met us at Texas Linux Fest, then you should definitely drop in an say hello. If you didn’t attend Texas Linux Fest, you should still stop by and say hello! We have channels for a wide range of partially overlapping geeky topics. The key point of overlap is probably that almost everything in there is adjacent to a hobby that Brian and I share.

NTX Makers Meetup - Combat Robots, Light-Up Tongue Drums, and a Massive DIY CNC Mill

2025-09-17T10:00:00-05:00

Last night’s NTX Makers meetup at Dub’s Tea N’ Eats was a blast! So many friendly people were excited to show off their projects.

NTX Makers

Trent showed off his RGB tongue drum kit

Trent explained that he is not a professional player of the tongue drum. I don’t know if the pros need to look, but Trent says that he does need to see the tongues to hit them in the right spots to get the notes that he desires. The trouble is that you usually wind up playing a tongue drum in dimly lit places.

Trent design a custom PCB with a built-in battery charger and microphone that connects to a ring of RGB LEDs that are all housed in a beautiful 3D-printed shell. This pops into a hole on the bottom of the drum, and it is held in by magnets.

It is a genius idea. It casts colorful light up through the gaps around the tongues of the drum allowing the drummer to see what they’re doing, while also casting colorful lights on the drummer, walls, and ceiling. It is also able to change color depending on which notes it hears you playing.

Trent says this will probably be up on Etsy soon.

Peter’s massive assortment of combat robots

We found out that Peter runs Repeat Robotics. I am only an FPV drone guy, so I might not quite understand the significance here, but they sell custom-built brushless motor assemblies and other parts for your DIY battle robots. While showing off his older robots, he was often explaining how he had to modify off-the-shelf brushless motors for our FPV drones with custom housings and shafts.

It sounds to me like you can save time, effort, and money when you just buy the ready-to-go motors from a place like Repeat Robotics.

Peter showed off tiny robots, large robots, angry robots, and inexpensive robots. He explained a bit about how one would go about competing in these events.

Repeat Robotics

Olivia’s failed CNC project wasn’t too bad!

Olivia has been working on a set of custom Tarot cards and their artwork for three years now. I’ve been watching her make progress on the CNC-cut box to contain those cards over in our Discord community this week, and she’s been doing a fantastic job!

We’ve been watching her do test cuts with pine. She upgraded to poplar for the final production model, but things didn’t quite go to plan. While she was doing a v-carve operation on the lid, the part slipped out of her clamps, and she accidentally just a hole right through the top!

This sort of thing happens all the time during CNC projects. I’ve done similar and worse more times than I can count.

Olivia’s Shop

N8’s Skittle-sorting LEGO build

N8 in our Discord community built a really cool machine that sorts Skittles into individual buckets by color. I am particularly excited about this, because I have been grumpy ever since they switched out lime Skittles with green apple. Green apple just doesn’t fit with the other flavors in a standard bag!

I don’t know a lot of about LEGO electronics. The heart of the machine seems to be a LEGO SPIKE Prime module running on Pybricks.

Josh’s Massively heavy concrete CNC mill

This is a build that I definitely understand, and I have to say that I am more than a little envious!

I’m going to say that Josh did all the right things. If you want to machine metal, especially steel, then you need a heavy, rigid machine. I can’t imagine a more inexpensive way to make a frame for your custom CNC mill than to use concrete.

I don’t know exactly how heavy it is, but it is for sure heavy. I got tired just watching Josh and Peter lift that giant mill onto a table!

Lego’s home-made Korean-style sketching paper

Our old friend Lego from our Discord community has been working on making his own paper using the traditional Korean paper-making method. He brought a mockup of the paper-making rig he is going to be building, and he brought samples of paper that he made himself while learning this method in Cleveland, OH.

The paper looks amazing, but the feel of the paper was surprising! In the photos, and from a distance, the paper looks almost as though it should feel like fabric. It is very smooth on one side, has a slight texture on the other side, but what surprised me is how thin the paper is.

I know very little about paper.

You should stop by next month!

We meet on the third Tuesday of every month. You don’t have to bring a project to show off, but we will all be excited to see and hear about your maker project if you do bring it with you!

We meet after closing time at Dub’s Tea N’ Eats. This would be a good place to say something enticing, but I want to get this posted. I will probably come back later and update this!

Ultralight Fingertip Gaming Mice - Two Weeks With My 21-Gram L’il Magnum

2025-01-27T09:00:00-06:00

There seems to be a lot of hype around ultralight gaming mice. I am not at all certain where things shift from a mouse light to ultralight or superlight, but I do know that my Logitech G305 is rather heavy at 97 grams.

I have been intrigued by Optimum Tech’s Zeromouse for a long time, but it is on the expensive side and rarely in stock. I didn’t want to spend $150 on a weird mouse only to immediately discover that I hated it. I wanted to find a more cost effective route for myself, and I was hoping I could share it with all of you.

I wound up ordering a 49-gram VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro for $45 with the intention of designing my own ultralight 3D-printed frame. I used the mouse for a couple of weeks before disassembling it, and I have to say that it was a fantastic upgrade over my heavy Logitech G305. It was easier to track targets. It was easier to fling the mouse around to put the crosshairs on enemy players. It just felt nice, and it was a worthy upgrade on its own.

The tl;dr is that I didn’t just make a 3.2-gram frame for the $45 VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro. I also made a 3.3-gram frame for both the $19 VXE Dragonly R1 SE and $28 R1. It is called the Li’l Magnum!, and frames for both mice are available on Printables and MakerWorld.

I think it is important to say that the VXE mice are awesome on their own, and both the R1 Pro and R1 SE feel fantastic. I can’t easily tell the difference between the two, and if you just want an inexpensive and reasonably lightweight mouse, the 52-gram VXE R1 SE for $19 is a heck of a deal. You don’t even have to modify it. It is a great mouse out of the box.

Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Mouse Mod in my Tindie store
Can We Compete With The Zeromouse For Under $25?
The L’iL Magnum! Fingertip Mouse Is Now Customizable on MakerWorld!
Li’l Magnum! 22-Gram 3D-Printed Fingertip Mouse Mod For The VXE Dragonfly R1 and R1 SE
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at Printables
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at Printables
VXE Dragonfly R1 Series mice at Aliexpress
VXE Dragonfly R1 Series mice at ATK.store

Will an ultralight fingertip mouse instantly turn me into a better FPS gamer?!

Nope. It will probably have the opposite effect! I set my Li’l Magnum! to 3,200 DPI, just like all my other mice, and made sure my in-game sensitivity had me doing a 180-degree turn with about as much mouse movement as I am used to. Everything was dialed in about the same, and yet I was constantly over correcting!

My muscle memory was telling my hand how hard to push to get a 100-gram mouse to break free of the mouse pad and move an inch, but this isn’t a 100-gram mouse. It takes almost zero force to get it to start moving. It took a few days to start getting used to the weight, but once I did, I feel like I started to improve.

You can see how far the heavy Logitech mouse moves when I put just barely enough force into it to break the stiction. I was able to improve this by swapping the skates on the Logitech G305, but this is still a pretty good example of one way a light mouse feels different!

I have no science or data to back this up, but I feel like I am aiming way better at enemies at medium to long range. I am doing a much better job than I ever could tracking soldiers, demomen, and scouts that are arcing through the air while playing Team Fortress 2. I don’t know that I am doing any better way up close near melee range, but I am no longer doing worse.

I think I have improved overall, and it just feels better now playing with a 21-gram mouse.

Just how light is a 21-gram mouse?!

I had two moments that hit me right in the face. The first was about ten seconds after I had the circuit board from the R1 Pro installed in the first Li’l Magnum! shell. I put it down on the desk, flicked it around a bit, and said, “Wow! That moves so much easier than the heavy mouse!”

I almost immediately realized that I hadn’t even installed the PTFE skates yet.

After sticking the skates on, it didn’t take much longer to notice the other difference. You can’t scroll the wheel unless you hold the mouse. The wheel is hard enough to click that the whole mouse moves instead.

You can scroll the wheel as long as you’re pushing down on the edges. Those are the edges that aren’t normally exposed on a normal mouse, so that isn’t an intuitive thing to do.

You’re going to need two mice!

You aren’t going to want to use an ultralight fingertip mouse unless you are aiming. There’s nowhere to rest your palm. You can’t really stay ready on the scroll wheel. You’re always aiming, and you’re always active.

You’re not going to want to play Civilization VII, Oxygen Not Included, or Dwarf Fortress in the active stance a mouse like the Li’l Magnum! locks you into, and you’re not going to want to spend time editing video in DaVinci Resolve.

I am swapping between my Li’l Magnum! and my 97-gram Logitech G305. I expect that at some point I will reassemble the VXE R1 SE+ so I can have a 55-gram secondary mouse, but I need to wait until I am sure I won’t be printing new test shells for both mice!

Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at Printables
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at Printables

What about single-player games?

The first single-player game I fired up was Trepang2. It seemed like exactly the sort of game that would benefit from an ultralight mouse, and I was right.

It has been quite a few months since I finished the game for the first time, and I couldn’t remember how anything worked. I kept hitting the wrong keys, I couldn’t figure out how to grab enemies to use them as a shield, and I didn’t even remember that sliding into enemies was an option.

I played through the first real mission on the normal difficulty level. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to line up headshot after headshot. I remembered it being more challenging! I only started to run into real trouble when I got to the armored guys in the space suits.

I couldn’t remember what I how I was supposed to handle them aside from putting 50 bullets into their faces. That didn’t work as well as I hoped.

I expected the Li’l Magnum! to be laughably useless in Borderlands 3, and during my first few minutes of playing, I thought I was correct. I loaded up my Mayhem 10 Zane, and all my guns spam out huge sprays of glowing visual nonsense. There isn’t really any aiming involved. Just point in the general direction of the bad guy and hold down the trigger!

Then I switched to a sniper rifle, and I very much appreciated the low stiction and ease of fingertip aiming. I could definitely appreciate my Li’l Magnum! in Borderlands as long as I am using a gun with a long scope.

I will be picking up my Li’l Magnum! any time I play a game that requires aim.

Why is the Li’l Magnum! so square?! Is that OK?!

I worry that I am biased here. I saw a little review of the Zeromouse posted on Reddit, and it mentioned that using the Zeromouse is like trying to wear Optimum Tech’s glove. It is his glove, and it doesn’t quite fit everyone else.

The Li’l Magnum! is most definitely my glove. I took a guess where to put the side grips on the first prototype, I looked where my fingers landed, and measured how far they needed to be moved. Then I figured out that I didn’t need as tall of a grip for my fingers as I do for my big, fat thumb, and thinning that long grip out saved half a gram.

The buttons are relatively high and at that particular angle because I absolutely hated the feel of the cold wheel encoder against my index finger. I needed the buttons to be just above that spot, and the slight upward angle just felt better.

This is the 22.68-gram Li’l Magnum! using the slightly heavier VXE Dragonfly R1 SE circuit board

The right button is lower than the left. It doesn’t need to be high to keep my index finger away from the cold encoder, and the lower button also helps keep my longer index finger closer to the front of the button. When it was up at the same level as the left button, my middle finger wanted to rest near the back of the button. You don’t get nearly as much leverage back there, and this made the button much more difficult to click!

I have small pieces of VXE’s grip tape cut to fit the spots where my fingers hit, but I don’t really need it. The only spot where I get any discomfort after a few hours of Team Fortress 2 is at the back of the thumb grip, and that is an extremely minor complaint.

This is my glove. It fits me quite well. Maybe I will make some tweaks after other people find things to complain about. Do you want the Li’l Magnum! to fit you like a glove? You will be able to do that soon. The design is parametric, but it needs some tidying up to be easy to use.

Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at Printables
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at Printables

A 21-gram fingertip mouse probably isn’t for everyone

Normal size mice are getting lighter all the time. You can buy the 30-gram ZEN 8K for $85. I just learned of the G-Wolves HTX Mini 8K, which seems to be relatively normal size mouse that comes in just under 27 grams. It has very nice Razer guts, and that is approaching the weight of my Li’l Magnum! or the Zeromouse.

I do know that I would notice that extra weight. The weight of my $19 Li’l Magnum! goes up to nearly 27 grams when I install the 520-mAh battery. That is still a nimble mouse, but I can most definitely feel that extra weight.

The tiny fingertip-style mouse also does what the name implies. I do a lot of my smaller aiming corrections with my finger instead of my wrist or elbow, and the smaller the mouse is, the farther you can pull it towards you with your fingers without bumping your palm.

You may hate using a mouse like the Li’l Magnum!, but $19 and a 35-minute 3D-printing job is a cheap way to try something fun.

VXE Dragonfly R1 Series mice at Aliexpress
VXE Dragonfly R1 Series mice at ATK.store

Will the PLA plastic of the Li’l Magnum! hold up?

I have been wondering this myself! I want to stock the Li’l Magnum! in my Tindie store, but I don’t want to do it if it winds up being fragile. I haven’t been doing a good job of testing for durability, because I keep making tweaks and printing new mice. I haven’t used the same plastic for more than three days in a row so far!

I happen to have an awesome and versatile LumenPNP pick and place machine in my office, and Opulo has a nifty scripting interface library for Python called leash. I tacked one of my mice to the surface of the LumenPNP, located the correct position, and figured out where I would have to raise and lower the tool to simulate clicks.

My LumenPNP is physically clicking a Li’l Magnum! button approximately 32,000 every hour, or nearly 800,000 clicks in a day. It isn’t just clicking like you would at home. It is pushing the level about half a millimeter father than you can on your own mouse. If it can hole up to this, it can hold up to gaming.

The longevity of the clickers is the only durability that concerns me. You can squeeze the sides of the Li’l Magnum! pretty hard before it starts to flex. I am confident that you could break one if you wanted to. I am also confident that you shouldn’t just drop one in your laptop bag, because if you snag a button flapper on something in your bag you will definitely be able to tear parts right off the mouse.

The Li’l Magnum!’s paddles had no trouble surviving more than 1,000,000 clicks. I have since added chamfers to strengthen the corners, and I adjusted the connection point of the flappy paddles to be stronger.

Breaking a button during normal use would be my fault, and I definitely want to avoid that. Breaking your Li’l Magnum! through carelessness would be your own negligence. The Li’l Magnum! is sturdy in the ways that it needs to be for playing games, but I doubt it’d survive long while bouncing around unprotected in your laptop bag.

There are alternatives to my Li’l Magnum!

I didn’t do a good job exploring the alternatives, but I know they are out there. Everyone already knows about the Zeromouse, and I expect it is worth every penny of its $150 price tag. The Zeromouse has nice Razer guts, is printed in nylon on a high-end 3D printer, and it is 1.5 grams lighter than my lightest Li’l Magnum!.

There are other 3D printed mice. There are some free STL files on the usual 3D-printing websites. There are some paid models on Etsy. There are also physical 3D prints that you can buy. Most are for the Razer Pro V2 internals.

I expected that I would be getting in line to order a Zeromouse Blade when Optimum Tech starts accepting orders, but I have changed my mind singe I’ve been using my own mouse for a few weeks. I am exceedingly happy with my Li’l Magnum!.

Maybe I have done a fantastic job designing the perfect mouse, but it is more likely that I have just designed nearly the perfect fingertip mouse for my own hand.

Conclusion

I thought the Zeromouse looked interesting, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend $150 on what seemed like a gimmick. I no longer think it is a gimmick. I would buy a Zeromouse today if I didn’t already have my own similar mouse that I could dial in to fit my exact needs.

Maybe my Li’l Magnum! won’t fit your hand perfectly, but I don’t know of a less costly way of trying out a 21-gram fingertip mouse. You can spend $20 to $30 on a VXE Dragonfly R1 mouse, print out the appropriate Li’l Magnum!, and you can find out for yourself. Maybe you’ll want to tweak your Li’l Magnum!, or maybe you’ll want to invest in a Zeromouse Blade.

Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Mouse Mod in my Tindie store
The L’iL Magnum! Fingertip Mouse Is Now Customizable on MakerWorld!
Can We Compete With The Zeromouse For Under $25?
Li’l Magnum! 22-Gram 3D-Printed Fingertip Mouse Mod For The VXE Dragonfly R1 and R1 SE
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 / R1 SE at Printables
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at MakerWorld
Li’l Magnum! Fingertip Frame for VXE Dragonfly R1 Pro at Printables
VXE Dragonfly R1 Series mice at Aliexpress
VXE Dragonfly R1 Series mice at ATK.store

My Thoughts On Brian Moses’s DIY NAS 2025 Edition

2024-12-26T02:00:00-06:00

I was supposed to get together with Brian for pizza tonight. At least, it was supposed to be pizza night when I started writing these words. It may be a few days or weeks later by the time I manage to actually publish this blog.

Pizza night didn’t work out this week, so I didn’t get to jabber at Brian about how his 2025 DIY NAS build blog is going this year. That means I am going to tell you my thoughts before I even get to jabber at Brian in real life about them!

I am going to come right out and state the obvious. I think this year’s DIY NAS is fantastic. I love Jonsbo’s cases. They look good and are reasonably priced. I think the 5-bay Jonsbo N2 is right in the sweet spot. It is extremely compact, yet it has just enough 3.5” drive bays to keep 95% of home-server enthusiasts happy.

I also think the new Topton motherboard is delightful. It has just enough SATA ports, and having 10-gigabit Ethernet on-board is fantastic, because 2.5-gigabit Ethernet gear is almost as cheap as 1gbe, and 10-gigabit Ethernet over copper is starting to be reasonably priced.

I am a huge fan of the Intel Celeron N100 CPU. It sips power, has tons of video-encoding horsepower, and is more than fast enough to handle a RAID and keep that 10-gigabit NIC as saturated as the mechanical hard disks could ever go.

DIY NAS: 2025 Edition

Why not just buy a prebuilt NAS?

The prebuilt NAS boxes we’ve been excited about in our Discord community are the various machines from UGREEN. Some of them are roughly in the same price, performance, and capacity range of Brian’s 2025 DIY NAS.

Comparing the prices is challenging, because the UGREEN DXP NAS servers have been going on sale a lot lately. It may be because of Christmas. It might be because they are relatively new on the retail market. It also may just be that the sale price is what we should be paying for these devices, and the retail price is just there to make the sale prices look better!

UGREEN’s 2-bay, 6-bay, and 8-bay offerings all cost around $200 per 3.5” hard drive bay, though the 4-drive bay gets close to Brian’s DIY NAS at about $120 per drive bay when there is a discount.

The fifth bay in Brian’s NAS either allows you to save money on hard disks, because you will be dedicating less of your total storage to parity, or it allows you to put one more of the biggest disks available in your NAS to increase your storage.

UGREEN DXP NAS Servers at Amazon

I forgot to mention the toaster NAS!

I can’t believe I left this out when I published this blog! If you are looking at the UGREEN 2-bay NASync server, then you should definitely at least take a glance at the toaster NAS.

That isn’t its real name. Your pair of hard drives slot in from the top, so we affectionately refer to it as a toaster. It is a neat box that several Chinese companies have put their branding onto.

The toaster has a power-sipping yet mighty Celeron N100 processor, 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports, an NVMe slot, and room for two bit 3.5” hard disks in a nice, compact shell.

The toaster is a little more DIY than the UGREEN boxes, because I believe UGREEN ships their servers out with their own operating system installed. The toaster has no drives installed and no software. You’ll be loading something like Proxmox or TrueNAS Scale on your own!

You can usually get the toaster NAS on Aliexpress for under $200. It is a lot of hardware for the price!

The Topton N1 NAS: Brian’s thoughts on a Toaster!
Topton 2-Bay R1 Pro NAS review at Brian’s Blog
Topton 2-Bay R1 Pro NAS at Amazon
Topton 2-Bay R1 Pro NAS at Aliexpress

That is why drive bays matter

Having more 3.5” hard disk bays in your NAS can help a lot. If you plan to use RAID 5 or RAID-Z, then you are going to be dedicating one entire disk to parity information for redundancy. That is one-fourth of a 4-bay UGREEN NAS, one-fifth of Brian’s DIY NAS, or one sixth of the bigger 6-bay UGREEN NAS.

I did some math assuming you can get brand-new hard drives when they go on sale for $16 per terabyte. This is a pretty common price for 14-, 16-, and even 18-terabyte drives, but it is rare to see 20-terabyte or 22-terabyte drives on sale at this price.

You could put four 22-terabyte drives in a UGREEN NASync box to have 66 terabytes of usable RAID 5 storage for $1,720, or you could install five 18-terabyte drives in Brian’s DIY NAS for 72 terabytes of usable storage for $1,440.

That saves you more than $300, and you wind up with an extra 6 terabytes of storage.

The difference in cost shrinks rapidly when you are using smaller or refurbished drives. I would encourage you to do the math on exactly what you’re planning on buying!

Brian did a good job threading a needle!

I believe Brian’s NAS build is a better value than any of the UGREEN boxes, but his build is positioned where it almost competes directly with the best priced UGREEN NAS. I think Brian’s particular build competes better on price with UGREEN’s 2-bay, 6-bay, and 8-bay NAS offerings, and a slightly different DIY NAS build would wipe the floor with every UGREEN box on both price and capabilities.

A 4-bay NAS should be immediately crossed off your list if you are planning to use RAID 6 or RAID-Z2. Either of these 4-disk RAID configurations work out to the same as efficiently as a mirror when you only have four drives. Either way you will be dedicating half your storage space to redundancy.

The Jonsbo N3 case would upgrade Brian’s DIY NAS case to 8 drive bays. I am confident that I could pick an appropriate motherboard with enough SATA ports to make use of all those drives bays for a lot less than the difference in price between Brian’s 2025 NAS and the $1,200 UGREEN 6-bay NAS, and I’d expect my 8-bay DIY NAS to cost WAY less than the $1,500 8-bay UGREEN NAS. The lazy answer might be to slot a $50 m.2 6-port SATA card into the 2025 DIY NAS motherboard to make use of the extra drive bays in a Jonsbo N3, and you would most definitely beat the pants off the storage value of the larger UGREEN NAS machines.

That is the only paragraph I am going to dedicate to the idea of building an 8-bay 2025 DIY NAS. It would take a lot of research and an entire blog post to go into a reasonable amount of detail, and I am surely not the DIY NAS guy!

The trouble is that most home users don’t need eight drive bays. You might start out needing just a single 20-terabyte SATA hard disk or pair of them in a mirror. You really want to be able to move up to a RAID 5 or RAID-Z to make your redundancy more efficient when you outgrow your 2-disk mirror, and to do that you want at least four or five hard disks.

It feels like a bit of a no man’s land between two and five disk NAS servers. Two is fine. Three is yucky. Four is OK. Five disks starts to be awesome.

Five is a pretty good number because you get four disks’ worth of storage and only dedicate one disk’s worth of storage to redundancy. You don’t need six or eight disks unless you need A LOT more storage.

Brian has done a good job. He’s put together a 5-bay storage cube. That is the perfect size for the vast majority of home users who have outgrown a single disk. The best part is that he’s managed to squeeze in a good bit more bang for your buck than an off-the-shelf NAS.

DIY NAS: 2025 Edition

I think Brian should be bragging a lot harder about the 10-gigabit Ethernet port

I recently upgraded the connection between my home office and my network cupboard to 10-gigabit Ethernet. I did zero research when choosing the 10-gigabit PCIe card for my desktop PC, and I wound up buying a $17 Intel X520-T2 card. This older Intel card all by itself uses almost as much power as Brian’s 2025 DIY NAS when you subtract out the wattage for the hard disks, and I had to pull the heat sink and replace the thermal compound to get my 10-gigabit card to stop overheating.

Brian’s motherboard uses a 10-gigabit chipset I could have bought in a PCIe card at Aliexpress for around $55, and it would have lowered my additional power consumption from nearly 20 watts to less than 4 watts. It also would have eliminated my overheating issues.

The fact that Topton was able to squeeze this 10-gigabit Ethernet chipset onto such a reasonably priced, power-sipping motherboard is amazing. It is such an upgrade over what we had available just a year or two ago!

Advantages of doing it yourself

My first argument against pre-built NAS hardware has always been the proprietary nature of these things. They use custom power supplies, custom motherboards, and non-standard cases. You often can’t even install your own operating system down the road.

The UGREEN NASync boxes are still using a proprietary case and motherboard. When something fails in the future, you’re going to have to hope that UGREEN can sell you a replacement part in five years. That said, they are at least normal UEFI x86 machines, so you can install whatever operating system you like. That’s a huge improvement over some of the more expensive proprietary NAS hardware we have seen over the years.

Brian’s NAS uses a standard case, a standard power supply, and a standard motherboard form-factor. Your SFX power supply might last you a decade. There are more than a few power supplies available with a 10-year warranty! The Jonsbo N2 case could be in your home even longer than that. You can upgrade the motherboard every five years, or whenever some new exciting feature show up.

Maybe you will eventually decide that the Jonsbo N2 just isn’t cool enough or spacious enough for you any longer. You can move the drives, motherboard, and power supply to a different case. Brian has everything in this build nearly maxed out today, but that might not be the case in two years.

UGREEN NASync storage servers at Amazon

Doing it yourself means choosing exactly the hardware you need!

Do you know what might be even more important? You get to pick what hardware goes into your own DIY NAS build!

You might be like me. You have a stack of efficient mini PCs that provide the compute for all your virtual machines, and you might not want to run all that much on your NAS besides the actual file storage and sharing stuff. You’ll probably be just fine building your NAS with the absolute minimum amount of RAM.

That said, [the Intel N100 is a mighty little processor][n100bw]. It can transcode 10-bit 4K video for Plex or Jellyfin at a pretty good speed, and you’ll have plenty of CPU cycles left over to handle file-sharing duties. You could think about maxing out that RAM, because you might be able to fit all your homelab virtual machines and containers on that single machine.

And if you do want to cram your entire homelab onto a single piece of hardware, maybe that means you want to squeeze in a little more CPU. Brian has a fantastic rundown of Topton’s fantastic assortment of mini-ITX motherboards posted here at Butter, What?!. I bet there’s something in the list that you’d find interesting!

I think you should put together your own NAS!

I don’t want to twist your arm. You should do whatever makes the most sense for you or whatever makes you happy.

Building a computer, whether it is your gaming PC, your workstation, or a server, is a fun task to work on every couple of years. If I were adding a box to my server farm once a week or once a month, I would absolutely be buying servers from Dell or HP. I’m not doing that. I am occasionally adding to my home network or updating the infrastructure for our blogs, so doing something hands-on once in a while is enjoyable.

I get to pick out exactly which parts I want to use. I get to balance idle power consumption, maximum horsepower, and price. I get to fit in exactly as much storage, RAM, and CPU as I feel I need, and I get to put them in exactly the sort of enclosure that I like.

I am trading some of my time to save money, but setting up a prebuilt NAS will still require an investment of my time.

Conclusion

I think Brian Moses did a good job building a NAS this year. He’s packed in a power-sipping processor that is more than up to the task, a 10-gigabit Ethernet port, and five 3.5” drive bays for less than $125 per 3.5” drive bay. It feels like Brian understands what people who need a larger amount of storage would actually need in their homes.

What do you think? Did Brian hit the sweet spot here on features and price? Do you think he could have done better? What would you have done differently? Let Brian and I know in the comments, or join our Discord community to tell us what you think!

Topton DIY NAS Motherboard Rundown!

2024-08-16T00:00:00-05:00

Over twelve years ago, I built my very first DIY NAS. At the time, I had a very specific and unconventional idea in mind for my DIY NAS to be: small, with a passively cooled CPU, room for about 6 SATA drives, without breaking the bank. A bit surprisingly, I stumbled on a discounted motherboard that met this criteria, the ASUS E35M1-I Fusion. The motherboard met my criteria and it wound up being incredibly inexpensive, so naturally I bought it!

In every year since, finding a motherboard for one of my DIY NAS builds has become more and more difficult. Solid state drives’ dominance for performant storage is the most likely reason. Nobody is–nor should be–building a computer today where multiple hard drives are primarily responsible for storage. As a result, finding lots of SATA ports on “consumer-grade” Mini ITX motherboards has become increasingly rare.

Enter Topton’s NAS Motherboards

Just over two years ago, people started to ask me about some NAS motherboards that they had been seeing on Aliexpress.com. The motherboards met all of my ideal criteria, plus they included more storage via two M.2 slots and 2.5Gbps networking!

I’m no stranger to ordering inexpensive things from sites like Aliexpress, but I’ve found that the quality, the amount of shipping time, and a frustrating customer support experience tended to torpedo the value proposition. I found the Topton N2 NAS Motherboard irrisistable and decided I’d buy one to try it out and then featured it in the DIY NAS: 2023 Edition.

I was impressed enough with the Topton N2 NAS Motherboard that I decided I’d try and solve some of my complaints about buying from overseas vendors and resell them in the briancmosesdotcom store on eBay.

Since then, I’ve been steadily ordering small batches of Topton products and reselling them on eBay. As of this blog post, I’ve yet to have a motherboard returned to me which wound up being defective.

Topton keeps releasing interesting Mini ITX Motherboards!

I halfway expected Topton to rest on their laurels and simply periodically update this one NAS motherboard, but they’ve far exceeded my expectations. Topton keeps introducing new motherboards while continuing to supply their previous models, too!

I wish that I had the resources to review more of these motherboards and stock them in my eBay store. Given my positive experience reselling the models that I do stock, I thought it was worth detailing all of their motherboards that I’m aware of and picking out my favorite three.

I created a spreadsheet with specific details about the Topton motherboards that I’ve been made aware of which I think would work well in a small-form factor NAS or Homelab machine.

Topton NAS / Homelab Motherboards Spreadsheet

Here’s a summary of that spreadsheet:

Model	CPU(s)	RAM	SATA	M.2	PCIe?	NICs	Ali	Amz	eBay
N2	N5105 N6005	2xDDR4 SO-DIMM	6	2	No	4x2.5GbE	$129 $183	$189 $239	$170 $190
N3	N5105	2xDDR4 SO-DIMM	6	2	No	4x2.5GbE	$130	$170	$170
N4	J6412 J6413	2xDDR4 SO-DIMM	6	2	No	2x2.5GbE 1x1GbE	$164 $174	$190 $197	$184 $200
N5	N5105	2xDDR4 SO-DIMM	6	1	No	4x2.5GbE	$106	$170	$160
N7	N100 N305	1xDDR5 SO-DIMM	6	2	No	4x2.5GbE	$165 $283	$200 $300	$210
N10	i3-N305	1xDDR5 SO-DIMM	6	2	Yes	4x2.5GbE	$290	$318
N11	8845HS 7940HS	2xDDR5 SO-DIMM	9	2	Yes	4x2.5GbE	$493 $543	$555 $650
N12	i3-1115G4 i5-1135G7 i7-1165G7	2xDDR4 SO-DIMM	6	2	Yes	4x2.5GbE	$209 $269 $299	$300 $376 $420
N13	LGA1700	2xDDR5 U-DIMM	8	3	Yes	2x2.5GbE	$338 $418		$310
N14	N100 i3-N305	1xDDR5 SO-DIMM	6	2	Yes	2x2.5GbE	$163 $263	$208 $288	$325
N15	8505 i5-12450H	2xDDR5 SO-DIMM	6	6	Yes	4x2.5GbE	$193 $293	$239 $319	$310
N16	LGA1700	2xDDR5 SO-DIMM	8	2	Yes	4x2.5GbE	$134
N17	7840HS 7940HS	2xDDR5 U-DIMM	4	2	Yes	2x2.5GbE	$303 $363
N18	N100	1xDDR5 SO-DIMM	6	2	No	1x10GbE 2x2.5GbE	$133		$249

Disclaimers:

I tried really hard to find quality links to the motherboards on AliExpress, Amazon, and eBay. None of those product listings (except my own!) incorporate Topton’s model number. Please double-check with the vendors if something looks out of place!

All of these links are either to Brian’s eBay Store or are affiliate links.

The information in this table is really generic. If you want more details, then check out the Topton NAS / Homelab Motherboards spreadsheet.

3. Topton N2: N6005/N5105 Mini-ITX NAS Motherboard (6x SATA, 2x M.2, 4x 2.5Gbps NICs)

Sentimentally, the very first Topton motherboard is a natural fit for my top three. The two CPU options (Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005) are both efficient and incredibly capable CPUs. Despite not being documented, many users have had luck running up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM in their machines. The storage options (2x M.2 NVMe and 6x SATA3) allows for a significant amount of redundant storage. Finally the, four Intel I226v network interfaces are still a really nice surprise.

These N5105 / N6005 CPUs are a generation behind the remaining motherboards in my top three, which could be disappointing. But if RAM is important to what you plan to do, then the dual DDR4 SO-DIMM slots are a big advantage over the remaining motherboards. When I re-built my offsite NAS, I still opted to pick the Topton N2 motherboard.

2. Topton N14: N100/i3 N305 Mini ITX NAS Motherboard (6x SATA, 2x M.2, 2x 2.5 Gbps NICs,1x PCIe 3.0 x4)

As much as I liked both the N5105 and N6005 CPUs, I like the Intel N100 CPU a little bit more, it is more powerful, and has a lower TDP (6W). But what I really like about the Topton N14 is that it drops two of the 2.5Gbps NICs in exchange for a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. The availability of this slot to use for something like a HBA or a 10Gb NIC is quite compelling.

The single DDR5 SO-DIMM slot is kind of bittersweet. DDR5 RAM is more expensive than DDR4, and generally speaking, buying larger sticks of RAM tends to be a bit costlier. A 48GB DDR5 SO-DIMM sells for $150+, while a 64GB Kit of DDR4 SO-DIMMs is about $40 dollars cheaper. Even worse, there don’t seem to be any 64GB DDR5 SO-DIMMs on the market, yet.

1. Topton N18: N100 Mini ITX NAS Motherboard (6x SATA, 2x M.2, 2x 2.5Gbps NICs, 1x 10Gbps NIC)

This motherboard is brand new to me, and I’m really excited about it. As soon as I have enough cash, I plan to buy it. It’s powered by the N100 CPU, has the same storage options (6x SATA and 2x M.2), but has different network options: dual Intel I226-v NICs, and a 10Gbps NIC (Marvell AQC113C).

The inclusion of an onboard 10GbE NIC is really exciting, and from what I can tell, the price of these motherboards is incredibly competitive. ~~I hope to be ordering these motheboards in the near future to review and sell!~~ I like this motherboard so much, that I acquired some and listed the Topton N18 Motherboards on my eBay store! Will the N18 be featured in a DIY NAS build on briancmoses.com soon? Stay tuned!

Final Thoughts

If you count all the different motherboard combinations, a single company by itself is resoponsible for nearly two dozen different motherboards that I’d be interested in building a DIY NAS or homelab machine out of. In recent years, I’ve had a hard time finding 10 motherboards across numerous other manufacturers.

What do you all think? Which of Topton’s motherboards are you most interested in, and why? Which motherboard(s) should I be buying and adding to my eBay store? Let us know in the comments, or come tell us in the #diynas-and-homelab channel in the Butter, What?! Discord server!

Mighty Mini PCs Are Awesome For Your Homelab And Around The House

2024-07-07T00:20:00-05:00

I have been doing a bad job. I have been neglecting the Butter, What?! blog. I haven’t posted anything here since I bought my Bambu A1 Mini in December. The good news is that everything I said about the Bambu A1 Mini in December is still true today, so I suppose I at least did a good job there, but I need to get back to posting here.

I figured I could write some words here about mini PCs. Although they are awesome, I am a little tired of writing about mini PCs. I think I am up to four separate blog posts over on patshead.com about mini PCs, and that is already accidentally one more than I intended to write. One of the reasons the Butter, What?! blog exists is to summarize these other blogs and tie them together just like the rug from The Big Lebowski, so I really ought to do that here!

The brands!

We have all been pretty focused on the mini PCs from Beelink in the Butter, What?! Discord community. Somebody bought one, and they had good luck. Then someone else bought one. Now everyone has been buying Beelink boxes, and they are constantly going on sale.

There are a lot of other brands, but I only have first hand experience with three of them. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the other brands. I just can’t speak with any sort of real confidence about them.

My CWWK N100 homelab server (left) next to Brian Moses’s Beelink N5095 off-site NAS (center) on top of our USB hard disks

I wound up trying out a Trigkey N100 mini PC, and it turns out that it looks exactly like a Beelink. It is the same case as a Beelink N100, and the mailing address on the box matches Beelink. I assume it is just another name to expand how often they show up when you search for mini PCs on Amazon.

The Trigkey and Beelink boxes always ship with a small amount of RAM and storage. The less RAM they ship with, the better the value. It is almost always a better idea to buy the one with the least RAM and upgrade it yourself.

I also have a CWWK mini PC router box. The CWWK boxes usually ship with no RAM or storage, and it is always a better idea to buy your RAM and storage separately with these CWWK boxes anyway. These tend to carry a bit of a price premium, but they come in nicer cases, and they usually have unique features like four 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports or five NVMe slots.

I spent $420 building a 20TB DIY NAS to use as an off-site backup at Brian’s Blog

Please don’t buy a Raspberry Pi!

The Raspberry Pi used to be an amazing piece of hardware for the price. The performance has been increasing with every new model, but so has the price, and the prices are going up faster than the performance. Not only that, but supplies are often limited.

I am sure you can get a better deal if you shop around, but I am seeing $92 for a bare 8 GB Raspberry Pi 5 board on Amazon. You will need to supply your own storage, a power supply, and some sort of case.

You can get a Beelink with a faster Celeron N5095 with 8 GB of RAM for $129. The sticker price is $159, but they go on sale for $129 once or twice a week.

This is my off-site Raspberry Pi storage server. I bought it back when a Pi 4 could be found any day of the week on Amazon for $30.

Do you know what you get with the Beelink that you don’t get with the Raspberry Pi? You get a 256 GB NVMe, a case, and it comes preloaded with Windows 11.

The Beelink N5095 isn’t quite as power efficient as a Raspberry Pi, but it still sips a good bit less than 10 watts. That real NVMe storage is so much more durable than a micro SD card, the RAM can be upgraded to 32 GB, and Intel’s GPU is so much more capable. The Beelink is a much more capable machine.

If you have read this, and you still want to use a Raspberry Pi, that is just fine! I definitely won’t try to stop you. I just want to make sure you have all the important information!

A mini PC works fine at our desk!

The fan in my desktop PC’s power supply is starting to make a bit of noise, so I had to do a bit of surgery this week. I decided to plug my spare Trigkey N100 mini PC with 16 GB of DDR4 memory into my 34” ultrawide monitor at my desk just to make sure I would have somewhere to work while my much nicer machine was disassembled.

It worked out just fine. I was not going to be editing video, but I don’t see why it couldn’t do some basic splicing and exporting in DaVinci Resolve. I also wasn’t planning on running an LLM or Stable Diffusion, or playing recently released video games. It did a fine job at letting me chat on Discord; browsing Reddit, Mastodon, and Hacker News; and let me write blog posts in Emacs.

Mini PCs are just laptops without screens, batteries, and complicated lid and motion sensors. My N100 mini PC is one of the slowest and most inexpensive models you can buy. I got mine for $145, and it has as much RAM and roughly 60% of the performance of my $550 14” 2-in-1 laptop. That is certainly enough horsepower to check email, chat with the Butter, What?! Discord community, or send jobs to my 3D printers.

I am working on a spreadsheet containing the vital data regarding these mini PCs. It is geared toward building a homelab full of mini-PC servers, but it should be usable for puzzling out how much you might want to spend on a mini PC for your desk.

Working at your desk with a large monitor on a tall stand that allows you to sit up straight is significantly more comfortable than looking down at a laptop. It might make more sense to buy a laptop and plug that into your monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but leaving an inexpensive mini PC at your desk just so you don’t have to unpack your laptop to check your email seems smart, too!

Pat’s Mini PC Comparison Spreadsheet

Gaming on the TV

This might be the most fun I have ever had with a mini PC. I bought my spare Trigkey N100 mini PC to expand my homelab, but it still hasn’t made its way into my network cupboard. I have been shoehorning this mini PC into other jobs just to see how well it can do, and so far it has always managed to impress me!

A Celeron N100 is a slow CPU with a tiny GPU. It isn’t designed to play games, and it won’t play anything remotely modern or daminding, but it is a pretty nifty gaming machine for $140.

Of course it can play an ancient and simple game like Super Meat Boy extremely well. We spent an entire weekend pizza night playing that one! It can play more modern side-scrolling games like Dead Cells, it can run the majority of the old video game consoles available to play in Retroarch, and it can even emulate the Nintendo Wii.

It is challenging to record compelling video footage of playing a game on the TV, so here is some footage of me streaming Red Dead Redemption to my $60 Alldocube Android tablet

My Trigkey mini PC does a fantastic job streaming Steam games from my gaming PC, but so does my ancient Steam Link hardware. The Celeron N100 has a better WiFi chipset, and its extra horsepower means it can decode video faster, so it does manage to shave about 8 milliseconds of latency off what the Steam Link can manage in my house.

There are faster yet more expensive mini PCs that can run more modern games at reasonable resolutions and frame rates, but I am not sure they are a good value for the job.

Valve’s Steam Deck is difficult to beat. It is a faster gaming machine than any of the mini PCs in its price range, and the Steam Deck has a battery, touch screen, and a built-in controller.

It is a much more versatile gaming machine, but I would be tempted to argue that the Steam Deck is also a mini PC! If I still had the sort of job where I might be flying out to tour facilities and pick up slack, I would have a Steam Deck in my laptop bag. I would play video games at night, and I would boot Proxmox and an array of useful work-related virtual machines off a USB-C SSD during the day.

Since writing this blog, I upgraded the gaming PC in my living room to a $300 Ryzen 6800H mini PC running Bazzite with an awesome GameSir Cyclone 2 wireless controller. Bazzite makes the mini PC behave much like a Steam Deck, and the Ryzen 6800H is slightly faster than the Steam Deck, so I can play Grand Theft Auto Enhanced at around 60 FPS with the settings turned up to a reasonable level.

Mini PCs are homelab heavyweights that could fit in a lunchbox!

Whenever I start checking out prices on mini PCs, I wind up picturing how I might be able to arrange them to fit inside of the Return of the Jedi lunchbox I had when I was in first grade.

This would be a neat contest, but I don’t understand what would make for a good set of rules. Do the power supplies need to fit? Would it be OK if the cabling sticks out, or would this hypothetical lunchbox actually have to be able to close? Would we just deduct points for how much sticks outside the box? What would the goal even be?!

The important thing is the picture this paints in your head. If a short stack of servers fits in your childhood lunchbox, then that cluster is obviously quite small–much smaller than a single 1U server or old desktop PC!

A stack of three Beelink mini PCs are about as tall and deep as a 3.5” USB hard disk is long and long.

You can build your homelab using one or two of the most expensive mini PCs. You could use two, three, or four of the weakest and least costly mini PCs. You can even mix and match models, or add new mini PCs as your needs grow.

I did the math for you, and I figured out that every Beelink or Trigkey mini PC is worth the price, but the Beelink SER5 with a Ryzen 5560U pulls ahead slightly on both RAM per dollar and performance per dollar. Even so, the models higher up on the list start adding features like 2.5-gigabit Ethernet, dual network ports, and even dual m.2 NVMe slots.

You definitely get value for the additional money, but only if you have a use for those additional features!

There’s nothing wrong with using a big USB hard disk!

Mechanical hard disks are still the most cost-effective way to store tons of data. New hard disks cost under $20 per terabyte, and refurbished hard disks sometimes show up at under $7 per terabyte! We post these deals all the time on the Butter, What?! Discord server.

Solid-state drives were dropping in price quite quickly. I managed to grab a 1 TB SATA SSD for $34 shipped, but today you are lucky if you can find a deal as low as $60 per terabyte. Not only that, but it is challenging to find new SSDs larger than 4 TB. A 20 TB SATA or USB hard disk won’t cost you much more than a 4 TB NVMe today.

I have had a 14 TB USB hard disk attached to a Raspberry Pi running continuously for more than three years now at Brian Moses’s house. This is my off-site storage and backup server.

I think it has been almost two years since I replaced the RAID 10 in my home NAS with a single 14 TB USB hard disk.

The USB disk attached to my N100 mini PC has no trouble reading and writing at around 200 megabytes per second, and neither of these machines have had a serious glitch in their combined uptime of around five years.

I had a small and unexplained glitch in the first month or two of the Raspberry Pi’s service life. The USB drive was no longer visible to the Pi. Brian power cycled everything for me, and it hasn’t happened again since. I have been assuming that a child or fast-moving dog bumped into the piece of furniture where my gear lives, and that somehow bumped a power or USB cable for the hard drive. We will never know the truth!

What if one USB hard disk isn’t enough?!

I am currently have a Cenmate 6-bay USB SATA enclosure plugged into one of my Intel N100 mini PC Proxmox nodes, and it is working great so far!

The Cenmate unit doesn’t require any tools when installing 3.5” hard disks, it is about as compact and dense as a drive enclosure can be, and I think it looks nice. It is about as wide as a mini PC, so stacking a mini PC or two on top looks natural.

Enclosures like my Cenmate are also a good value. I paid significantly less in total for my Intel N100 mini PC and 6-bay enclosure than you would have to pay for a 4-bay UGREEN DXP4800 NAS with the same processor. I think that is impressive, because I have two more drive bays!

Is A 6-Bay USB SATA Disk Enclosure A Good Option For Your NAS Storage?

My backup plan relies on USB hard disks and mini PCs!

I live in a post-Dropbox world. Every single byte of my important data is stored on my local workstation. That data is synced to my Seafile server at Brian’s house 30 seconds after any changes are saved. All that data is then synced to my NAS, and the most vital directories are also synced to my laptop.

My most important data lives on an NVMe drive in my desktop PC and on the NVMe drive in my laptop. All my recorded video footage lives on a 12 TB SATA hard disk in my desktop PC. There’s just no room for six years of video footage on my laptop!

The first backup is my 14 TB USB hard disk at Brian Moses’s. The second backup is a 14 TB USB hard disk attached to my NAS. Seafile keeps 90 days of changes, and those changes are as granular as the tiny changes that are uploaded. My NAS has hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly snapshot rotations.

Sometimes the mini PC isn’t so mini!

When the mini PC isn’t quite as small, then it might have room for a couple of big hard drives!

Brian Moses stocks a 2-bay N100 NAS in his eBay store. I feel that it is priced pretty competitively. It is basically an overgrown Trigkey N100 DDR4 box, but the toaster NAS upgrades the network to dual 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports and adds a pair of top-loading 3.5” hard drive bays.

If you just don’t like the idea of using USB for storage, then this is a fantastic way to pay to avoid that problem. It is even better if you need two hard disks for either more capacity or redundancy.

I am in a fortunate position where I don’t need a RAID 1 on my off-site storage server. I can drive over to Brian’s house in 20 minutes to replace a failed hard disk.

Mini PCs are so inexpensive now that I would prefer not to run a RAID on any single server. I would prefer to attach each disk to its own server and keep everything synced up over the network. My goal is to spread my RAID-like storage around to as many physical locations as possible!

Brian Moses’s eBay store

A Mini PC is a fantastic off-site buddy NAS server!

My off-site buddy NAS box is still a Raspberry Pi. I bought mine when Raspberry Pi 4 boards were still $30 or $40. I wouldn’t buy a Raspberry Pi for this job today, and I have plans to upgrade my off-site server in the near future.

You can get a Beelink with an N5095 processor and 8 GB of RAM on sale for $120. That is more than enough horsepower for a little off-site storage box, but you only have to splurge a little to get a Trigkey N100 with 16 GB of RAM on sale for $145.

I am looking forward to having an off-site Proxmox server that I can migrate a couple of virtual machines to! I have upgraded my fiber Internet connection to symmetric gigabit, and Brian has upgraded his to 2.5 gigabit. His house is less than 10 milliseconds away, so Tailscale makes it feel like we are on the same LAN.

The best computer is often the one that you already have!

Mini PCs are neat because they are reasonably priced, you get a lot of computer for your money, they don’t take up much space, and they don’t put much of a strain on your electric bill or pump much heat into the room.

That old Dell tower that someone gave you might be a bit slower than a $150 mini PC, and it may use four times as much electricity, but if it has enough RAM and horsepower to do the job, then you should definitely consider using that old Dell!

It takes many years for a server chewing through 50 watts of electricity at the power outlet to add up to $150 in electricity where I live. If the math works out the same where you live, then keeping that old Dell computer out of the landfill for three or four more years might be a big win for the environment.

The cost of electricity is going up in many places around the world, so your mileage may vary!

Conclusion

I hope that I did a good job here. I did my best to not go too far off the rails or go too deep into any one particular use case for these nifty mini PCs. I have already written an entire 2,000 word blog post about every individual topic mentioned in this summary blog. You should have no trouble digging a little deeper if any of these use cases are of interest to you!

Are you already using one or more mini PCs around the house or in your homelab? Do you have an off-site mini PC NAS? Are you looking to set one up?

Share your thoughts and experiences with us by leaving a comment below, and join the Butter, What?! Discord community to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, ask questions, and stay up to date on the latest mini PC discounts and related projects!

The Bambu A1 Mini - The Best Choice for Your First 3D Printer

2023-12-05T09:00:00-06:00

The title may almost be a lie! I feel that all of Bambu’s printers are a good value, and the Bambu P1P, P1S, and X1C are also fantastic printers for both beginners and veterans. If you have the budget, and you need the bigger printer, you should definitely invest in one of those. If your needs are smaller, and your budget is smaller, it is tough to go wrong with the Bambu A1 Mini.

It is the $299 price tag that pushes the Bambu A1 Mini ever so slightly closer to being the best beginner 3D printer than its more expensive siblings.

Bambu has done a good job of taking 3D printers one giant step closer to being as accessible as an inkjet or laser printer. You don’t need nearly as much knowledge to get going with their printers as you do with printers from companies like Prusa Research, Creality, or Sovol. Bambu printers hold your hand every step of the way, but they also let you do what you need to do when you know what you are doing.

What does the A1 Mini do that an Ender 3 or Sovol SV06 can’t?

You can find yourself an extremely outdated Ender 3 for under $150, and Creality is still manufacturing those extremely outdated models. You can grab a pretty awesome Sovol SV06 for around $200, and that will likely be a solid printer that will hold up for years. I love my Sovol SV06.

The first problem with the other budget 3D printers is that you don’t know what you’re going to get when you open the box. As far as I can tell, most people have good luck, but Creality and Sovol seem to have the smallest customer service and quality assurance departments that they can possibly get away with. Bambu has demonstrated that they are much better at both of these tasks.

All of Bambu’s printers solve the two most common problems you will see posted on r/FixMyPrint. Every Bambu printer has advanced bed-leveling technology that means you get a perfect first layer every time. They share this in common with the Prusa MK4 and Prusa XL, but almost every other printer on the market requires the user to dial in that first layer, and most people don’t know how to do that.

NOTE: I printed these Gridfinity bins to let the Bambu AMS Lite use up some nearly empty spools and two samples of white filament. The AMS used up every inch of filament, switched to the next input when one ran out, and even detected a knot at the end of the first spool of filament.

If you can’t dial in your first layer, you are going to have a lot of failed prints. You won’t have to dial in your first layer with a Bambu printer.

The Bambu A1 Mini and the Bambu X1C both have sensors to automatically tune in your filament flow rate. The next most common problem on r/FixMyPrint is problems with flow rate adjustment. This doesn’t usually cause failed prints, but it can cause either weak or ugly prints. Not having to diagnose or tune for this problem is nice!

Veterans will tell you that calibrating flow and dialing in your first layer are both easy tasks. They aren’t wrong, but if you’ve never had to do either, then they are things you will have to learn. You might be one of the lucky ones, and you’ll get everything dialed in quickly on your Sovol SV06. You could also be unlucky, and you might waste hours trying to get things right.

I can look at your first layer as it is being printed and tell you exactly what is wrong with it, but I am sure as heck excited that I will never have to do that again.

There are some other things that the $299 Bambu A1 Mini can do that most budget prints can’t: record timelapses with the built-in camera, watch your print from your phone, and send print jobs over WiFi.

These were next-generation features two years ago, and only available in printers costing $700 or more until the Bambu A1 Mini started shipping. All the budget 3D-printer companies are scrambling to catch up right now, and they may have some good responses to the A1 Mini coming out during the beginning of next year. For now, though, Bambu is still miles ahead.

What are the downsides of the Bambu A1 Mini?

The biggest and most obvious problem with the Bambu A1 Mini is the size. That 180-mm build plate is tiny. Less expensive printers like the Sovol SV06 have 60% larger build plates, and they also offer more height.

If your goal is to print cosplay helmets, the Bambu A1 Mini is not the printer for you. Its larger siblings are for sure large enough to print helmets, but I always hear it is a little tight, so if you don’t have the budget for a Bambu X1C, you may very well be better off compromising on something like the 300-mm Sovol SV06 Plus. That is a big, solid, but slow printer.

I have been 3D printing for nearly a decade. I could probably count the things that I have printed in that time that wouldn’t fit on the Bambu A1 Mini on one hand. The A1 Mini is small, but not ridiculously small. You should check Printables for the biggest models you might want to print. See how big they are. I bet most of them would fit on the A1 Mini.

There is also the question of upgrades, repairs, and the ability to modify your printer. Printers from Creality, Sovol, and to a lesser extent Prusa Research are made from mostly off-the-shelf parts and run open-source firmware. If something goes wrong, or if the company goes out of business, your printer isn’t going to turn into a brick.

Bambu runs proprietary firmware on their own custom hardware, and so much of their printers are custom-made pieces. If Bambu went out of business tomorrow, then you might not be able to repair your printer when it breaks in two years.

This was something I was terribly concerned about when the Bambu X1C launched two years ago. Bambu hasn’t done anything since to make me think they will go out of business. In fact, the release of the Bambu A1 Mini has given me a huge amount of confidence in their future.

My Bambu A1 Mini - The First Six Hours of 3D Printing

Should you buy the combo with the AMS Lite?

I have only had my $469 Bambu A1 Mini Combo for five days, and so far, I am quite happy owning the AMS Lite. I don’t expect to do a lot of multicolor prints, but it will still be a nice convenience for me. I can choose which color I want to print without standing at the printer for five minutes swapping filament, or I can keep a spool of ABS or PETG loaded for the times I need to print a mechanical part.

I think it is a good deal. It is by far the lowest cost multicolor printer available with the next model being the Bambu P1S with the original AMS for $949. That is about double the price, but you do get a lot of upgrades for your money: double printing surface, more height, and an enclosure.

I also think the Bambu A1 Mini without the AMS Lite is a good deal at $299. It is by far the most advanced and easy to use 3D printer for anything less than $600.

What I am saying here is that I don’t think there is a wrong choice. If you want multicolor printing, the A1 Mini Combo is an amazing value. Even if you don’t print in color often, the AMS Lite is a convenience.

The biggest downside to the AMS Lite is the size. It isn’t exactly huge, but sitting it down next to such a tiny printer sure does make that tiny printer appear to take up a lot of space! Looks are a bit deceiving, because the A1 Mini Combo has the same footprint on the table as a Sovol SV06, or a slightly larger footprint than a Prusa MK3S.

Conclusion

The Bambu A1 Mini is a delightful and aggressively priced 3D printer, but like every 3D printer, it does make one huge compromise to get there. It is super fast, high quality, and has all the bleeding-edge features that you would expect from a Bambu printer. The compromise is in the size. If you can work with a small 3D printer, then there isn’t anything else that ticks as many boxes as the A1 Mini.

This is starting to change. The budget 3D-printer companies are already releasing printers in response to the Bambu A1 Mini, but they seem to be rushed, and they aren’t nearly as polished. I expect we will be seeing a lot of reasonably priced printers with perfect first layers next year, but for now, the Bambu A1 Mini is as good as it gets for under $600.

What do you think? Is it worth investing time to learn how to calibrate the z-offset on an outdated printer like the Sovol SV06 to save $100? Is it worth taking a risk on Creality’s new Ender 3 V3 lineup with its first attempt at automatic perfect-first-layer calibration? Or do you agree with me that a bleeding-edge, lightning-fast, trouble-free printer like the Bambu A1 Mini is worth the sacrifice of a little build volume? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

My Accidental Quest to Make My Gaming Computer Quieter

2023-10-29T10:00:00-05:00

I didn’t think I would be upgrading my CPU cooler last week. I moved all three desks and the 3D printer stand in my office to different locations in my office last week, and since doing so, I can definitely hear my case fans sounding louder. My workstation used to be tucked in between the wall and the desk, which muffled some of the noise. It is more out in the open now, and the fan noise is probably bouncing off of different surfaces than before. I figured this was a problem for future me to worry about.

Then I saw an aggressively named Thermalright Assassin CPU cooler on sale for a few bucks off. I was already using a 3D-printed adapter to stick an old 120-mm fan on my Wraith Stealth cooler to quiet things down a bit, but I know that cooler is a bit undersized for my Ryzen 5700X, so that fan is running at a higher speed than I would like.

When I saw a well-reviewed cooler that comes with a pair of 25-dBa fans for less than $20, it felt like a free upgrade. I almost didn’t want to pull the trigger, because I am lazy, and I didn’t want to haul my computer up onto my desk to work on it.

The tl;dr is that this cooler is a fantastic value at around $20. My Ryzen 5700X is able to run roughly 12% faster in multicore benchmarks than with the Wraith Spire cooler, my computer is definitely a little quieter, and my maximum temperatures dropped by over 30C. Swapping out my ancient 120-mm fans with a couple of newer 25-dBa Antec fans reigned in the rest of the noise at idle.

Zen 3 processors push their clocks pretty hard!

The Ryzen 5700X has the same TDP-rating as the Ryzen 1600 I replaced, and I was overclocking that Ryzen 1600. Even so, the Ryzen 5700X ran quite a bit hotter than the CPU it replaced. This was even more true when the p-states driver landed in the Linux kernel.

The Ryzen 5700X has a boost clock of 4.6 GHz, but Mangohud often shows short stretches running near 4.8 GHz while gaming. I assume I am getting a 200-MHz boost from PBO as long as the I don’t reach the thermal limits of the CPU, and it didn’t take a lot of gaming to push the CPU past 90C.

I know a lot of people are paranoid about CPU temperatures. As long as my CPU isn’t throttling down or shutting itself down, I don’t care how hot it gets. I didn’t upgrade my cooler for lower temperatures.

This is not an in-depth review of the Thermalright CPU cooler

I am not here to do comparative science on heat sinks. I had a noise problem that I needed to start solving, I saw an inexpensive product that seemed to fit my needs, and I ordered it on a whim. I am pleased with what showed up, I am pleased with how well it is working, and I mostly just want to let you know that. I am just one more anecdote for you to add to your data.

I will tell you about the little bits of science I have done in my accidental quest to quiet my office a bit.

My case had three ancient 120-mm fans. One was an intake on the side aiming towards the GPU, and two were exhaust fans aiming out the top. When I installed the Thermaltake cooler, I made sure to set all my BIOS fan profiles to silent. I believe this means that they start at 20% speed and work their way up to 100% speed at 70C.

Just putting the new cooler in was definitely a little quieter than before.

Then I unplugged all my fans. This is a heck of a lot quieter. Two of my three aging 120-mm fans have a very slight rattle or clunky sound.

I don’t think I could have gotten away with this with the old Wraith Stealth cooler, even with its upgrade to a 120-mm fan. The Wraith Stealth is a surprisingly substantial cooler. It has a heavy chunk of copper in the center, and there’s actually quite a lot of aluminum in the fins. Even so, the direction of the single fan probably makes it difficult for the Stealth to find much cool air to blow back on the CPU. It really needed other fans moving air through the case.

While idling with no case fans, the GPU fan usually stays at zero RPM, and both the Ryzen 5700X and Radeon 6700 XT stay below 60C. There is definitely enough cooling available to keep them even cooler than this, but the zero-RPM GPU fan is nice!

When I fired up a heavy game, the CPU and GPU both reach 65C. The bummer here is that the GPU fan spins quite fast, and those smaller fans are rather noisy.

I plugged one exhaust fan back in, and my temperatures dropped to about 60C again. I don’t think the GPU fan got any quieter. I am pretty sure this is just how loud the RX 6700 XT has always been while gaming, except now the ambient noise in my idle home office is a lot quieter, so the GPU fans really stand out!

Plugging one of the exhaust fans back in is enough to keep the CPU under 60C while gaming.

Those simple experiments made order a 5-pack of fans!

Shopping for quiet fans on Amazon was a bit of a bummer. You can get 1300-RPM fans from Noctua for $16 each. They are rated at 19.6 dBa, which is nice! There are so many inexpensive 1800-RPM and faster fans that call themselves quiet, but they are all rated at around 35 dBa.

If I put my fingers on the Thermalright CPU cooler fans to make them come to a complete stop, I can’t hear the difference in the noise level of my gaming computer. I figured that means that 25.6 dBa fans that top out at 1500 RPM would be a good level to shoot for, but I wasn’t turning up any good deals. I almost just ordered another CPU cooler just to steal the fans!

I probably only need two fans, but I found a deal for five Antec 1400 RPM case fans with the same dBa rating as my CPU fans for $30. I figured that would cover me if I decided I needed extra fans.

I have moved the noise problem to the other side of the office!

I have a Blueair Pro M air filter in my office. At least, that is the one I believe I have. Those are the filters I use, and my unit looks just like the one on Amazon. I leave it running it on its lowest setting, and it is now officially the loudest thing in my office unless I am playing video games!

I moved it behind the recliner, but I can still hear it. It really isn’t that loud. It is probably a good benchmark to help me understand how loud my workstation should be.

I have no trust in the first sound-meter app that I installed on my Pixel 6A. I doubt it is calibrated, but I am willing to trust it as a relative measure of how loud things are in my office.

When the air conditioning is running, the app is measuring an average of 53 dB. With my old, noisy case fans running at their minimum RPM, the app is measuring an average of 38 dB.

With two of the new Antec fans plugged in, I am reading an average of 33 dB. I think that is only 1 dB louder than with the fans unplugged, so I think I am doing a good job here!

The loudest thing in the case is the cheap 120-mm fan in the Enermax Marbebron 850W power supply.

Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus CPU Cooler at Amazon
5-pack of Antec PWM PC Fans at Amazon

I was a little too aggressive with the fan curves

I thought I was smart. Maybe I was. I ran the little fan calibration in the BIOS to allow the fans to spin at their absolute minimum speeds. If I remember correctly, I set the intake and exhaust fans to start speeding up when the CPU reached 52C, and I set the CPU cooler to start speeding up once the CPU reached 55C.

The idea here is that I wanted air to start coming into the case before the CPU would need it. So far, so good. As far as the CPU is concerned, this is working really, really well! The CPU often drops down as low as 34C, and I can barely hear these fans spin up at all if I run CPU-intensive tasks that manage to push the CPU up to 60C.

The trouble is coming in with the GPU. I like my particular Radeon 6700 XT. As long as the GPU temperatures stay below about 55C, the GPU fans don’t spin at all.

My GPU fans spin up quite often now. Two case fans constantly spinning at their minimum RPM just isn’t enough airflow to keep my idle GPU below 55C while its fans are off.

It isn’t awful. The GPU fans don’t spin up all that high, they don’t spin up very often, and they don’t stay spinning for long.

You’d think I would remember exactly what I did to correct this, because I did it last night, but my memory is already a little fuzzy. I do know the intake and exhaust fans were spinning at about 400 RPM. I bumped their minimum PWM up enough to put them both at just a hair over 500 RPM. I also raised the temperature where the CPU fan starts increasing in speed to maybe 58C. I may have lowered the ramp-up temperature for the case fans to 50C.

The idea here is to have a little more airflow at idle to keep the GPU fan from ever having to spin up while nothing much is going on, and also to try to get air into the case before the CPU starts to heat up.

It is working out well. My sound meter isn’t averaging any higher. My GPU is almost always under 40C, my CPU is usually under 50C, and my GPU fan hasn’t randomly spun up while idling.

Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus CPU Cooler at Amazon
5-pack of Antec PWM PC Fans at Amazon

How loud is 33 dB?

I don’t know. I don’t trust the app. It claims that 40 dB is equivalent to a quiet library.

Do you want to know why I feel like I have done a good job, and I don’t think I should put more effort into this? I have the phone sitting on my desk between myself and the keyboard. I have to stay still and breathe slowly and quietly to keep meter reading an average of 33 dB.

If I breathe louder or move my arms around, the average will go up to 36 dB.

The GPU fans are rather quiet when under around 1,400 RPM

I needed to have Stable Diffusion generate me at least one image to stick in this blog post, so I figured that was a good time to mess with the GPU power limits to see when the fans start to make a significant impact on the noise levels in here. I asked for 400 images of a guy next to a giant PC fan, set the GPU’s power limit to 10 watts, and slowly cranked that up until the fans started spinning.

My Radeon 6700 XT is usually running with the power limit set to its maximum of 186 watts, and it pretty quickly ramps up to where the GPU fans spin at 2,300 RPM.

At 60 watts, the fans never went past 1,100 RPM. The sound meter couldn’t pick up the change, and I could only just barely tell there was a different in pitch with my ears.

I wound up adjusting my quiet GPU profile in CoreCtrl to a 40-watt limit. That is more than enough juice for OBS to encode a video stream, and it gives me some safety margin to know that my fans won’t spin up while recording a [Create/Invent Podcast][ci] interview.

Are more fans quieter than fewer fans?

If I weren’t already down into the territory where my breathing makes a significant change on the noise meter, I would be filling all the empty holes in my case with fans just to see how it sounds.

The idea would be that six fans all running at 400 RPM should be quieter than two fans running at 1,000 or 1,500 RPM. That might be great if I cared about how quiet this rig is while playing games. However, I care much more about how quiet the machine is while recording a podcast.

Six identical fans at 400 RPM is surely louder than two fans at 400 RPM. Maybe not loud enough to matter, but still definitely louder. Probably not as loud as my Blueair filter!

If you’re aiming for quieter gaming, then I would bet at least a dollar that you’d be better served by filling your case with fans.

Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus CPU Cooler at Amazon
5-pack of Antec PWM PC Fans at Amazon

Conclusion

I don’t know how exciting following my short journey here has been for you, but it felt like I ought to document it. If this hasn’t been helpful for you, hopefully it will at least be helpful for me in a few years when I have forgotten what I have done here this week!

I am almost certain that the loudest thing in my case is the 120-mm fan in the power supply. I have to admit that I am a little tempted to put in the effort to swap one of these Antec fans into the power supply, but that will require so much more effort. I might have to pull the cables from the motherboard, and I might even have to do some soldering and splicing to connect the fan. None of this is particularly difficult, but it all adds up to a lot of work, and it probably won’t gain me all that much!

What do you think? Did I do a reasonable job? Do you feel that I stopped short of properly quiet? Should I have switched to water cooling so I could run a long hose to keep the radiator in another room? Should I have put the extra trio of Antec fans in the case? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

The Topton N1 NAS: Brian’s thoughts on a Toaster!

2023-09-26T11:45:00-05:00

I have been selling the Topton N5105 NAS Motherboard on eBay for quite a few months now. The manufacturer of the motherboard has sent me a couple product catalogs full of all sort of interesting products based around this (or similar) small form factor motherboards.

In this catalog, the Topton N1 NAS caught my attention for its price (under $200) and its features:

AMD 300U PRO CPU
2 x DDR4 DIMM SO-DIMM slots (up to 32GB)
2 x 3.5” (or 2.5”) Hard Drive Bays
1 x m.2 NVME SSD

Instantly, I thought this little NAS enclosure was perfect for a few NAS-related projects that I had coming up: my off-site NAS that’s sitting at Pat’s house or the DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2023.

A couple of months ago when I restocked my inventory of motherboards, I also ordered one of the Topton N1 NAS so that I could evaluate it, consider it for my two projects, and also decide if I wanted to start selling it in the briancmoses.com eBay store.

First impressions of the Topton N1 NAS

My initial impressions were very positive. At under $200, it’s a fantastic price for a 2-bay NAS. It features a CPU, the AMD Athlon PRO 300U, which is power-efficient (15W TDP), has a base clock of 2.4GHz, and a maximum boost clock of 3.3GHz that compares fairly well with the Celeron N5105 CPU. Of the two CPUs, I prefer the Celeron N5105 because it is newer, has more CPU cores (4 vs. 2), and is more power-efficient (10W TDP vs 15W), but the Celeron N5105 carries a heftier price tag too. I bought the barebones Topton N1 NAS (motherboard, case, and power supply) for less than I’ve been selling the Topton N5105 NAS Motherboard for on eBay.

Unboxing and Assembling the Topton N1 NAS

Unboxing the Topton N1 NAS was about what I expected. Most of the case is made out of plastic. The case is well thought out, but while disassembling it, I was more than a little concerned that I might break something if I was too brutish in handling it. I wound up completing the NAS by installing 32GB of DDR4 RAM, an Intel Optane 16GB NVMe SSD, and a pair of renewed Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB hard drives. When I was re-assembling the case, I wondered if all these plastic bits would rattle when the hard drives were active.

Like a lot of the other Topton offerings, the product listing warns:

DO NOT buy Barebone (“No Ram No Storage” bundle)If you are NOT IT hardware technician. Please check video, PC demands professional skill to assemble and debug. Barebone bundle must use Samsung, Micron etc ORIGINAL brand ram and storage. Please DO NOT open dispute if you buy barebone.

Having built a lot of PCs over the years and quite a few DIY NAS builds, I didn’t find disassembling or reassembling this case to be that difficult. But this warning is somewhat ominous-sounding. If you’re hoping for some kind of support after buying the product, you may want to buy one of the fully assembled variants available.

Installing TrueNAS SCALE and using the N1 NAS

My biggest worry about the N1 NAS was that there would be some sort of obscure hardware that wasn’t supported under TrueNAS SCALE, but I had SCALE installed and functioning without any issues on the first boot. I created a pool made up of a single mirrored vdev using two Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB hard drives.

This resolved my biggest concern about the N1 NAS: hardware compatibility. I was worried that there’d be some obscure hardware in the machine that either wasn’t supported by Linux or required a newer Linux kernel than what shipped with TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3. At this point, I was fairly convinced that it’d be able to be at least a very basic DIY NAS. Had I not already set up my off-site NAS at Pat’s house, I would have been very tempted to use this N1 NAS instead.

I had purchased a total of four of the renewed Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB hard drives. I have a few high-mileage drives in my personal NAS, and I wanted to have some drives on hand to use with my DIY NAS builds and as replacements for any drives that failed in my primary NAS. Because these new drives were all renewed, I used the N1 NAS to burn in the hard drives.

Once I had some confidence in the hard drives, I created an encrypted pool made up of a single mirrored vdev. I created an encrypted dataset, named media. Then I set up a TrueNAS replication task to sync my media collection from my personal NAS. I didn’t actually need to do this, but I wanted to put the N1 NAS and two of my “renewed” hard drives to work.

The replication task instantly saturated the Realtek Gigabit network interface. The replication started in the early evening and the task completed overnight.

Is this Toaster NAS a literal toaster?

While I was burning in my four hard drives, I kept an eye on the TrueNAS reporting and saw that the temperature of one of the drives was a little high (~52* celsius) and the other was a bit more normal (~43* celsius). Normally, when it comes to PC hardware temperatures, I am not nearly as concerned as most people you’ll read talking about such things. Very broadly speaking, I don’t worry one bit about temperatures that are within the specifications. The datasheet for the drives I’m using says the operating temperature should be between -40* and 70* celsius.

Personally, I wouldn’t be that worried, and I’d keep using these drives without any concern. But if you’re more sensitive to your hard drives’ temperatures, then I have a couple suggestions:

Use 5400 RPM hard drives instead: I have an old 2TB 5400 WD RED drive. I replaced my 7200 RPM Ultrastar DC HC530 with this 5400 RPM drives and repeated the same tests. It ran at least 10 degrees cooler than my 7200 RPM drives.
Improve the airflow: I personally thought about 3D-designing a new bottom piece which would allow me to add a fan to push more more air through the N1 NAS. But something like this cooling fan “stand” would probably help solve this so-called problem.

The temperature of one of the drives is definitely a little warmer than the other and also a bit warmer than you’d see in any of my other DIY NAS. But I didn’t think the drive temperatures were warm enough that I designed a solution, like I did when I created a cooling duct for the SilverStone DS380B case.

The Bad News

I was really excited about the N1 NAS and I was ready to feature them as this year’s EconoNAS! I wanted to buy a bunch and resell them in my eBay store. But each time I’ve talked to Topton, these are out of stock, and I don’t believe that they’re going to be restocked. I ended up going in an entirely different direction with the DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2023, and I’m excited how that turned out, but I’m a bit disappointed that I had to go down a different path.

Do you like the Toaster NAS? It’s not all bad news!

I like this NAS; I’d recommend it for anyone who was looking to to put together a small and inexpensive DIY NAS where the hardware is already assembled for you. If you shop on Aliexpress, they sure seem to be available. Just because I can’t buy and resell them doesn’t mean that other vendors don’t have inventory they’re looking to move.

You can buy my Toaster NAS!

While I’m not going to be stocking and selling the Topton NAS N1 on my eBay store, I will be auctioning this one that I’ve used for this blog in a no-reserve auction on eBay. It’ll come with the hardware I described above and preloaded with TrueNAS SCALE. If you’re an early reader of this blog, you have an opportunity to get in on the bidding. The auction began the day this blog was published (9/26), will run for 10 days, has a starting bid of $1.00 USD and is a no reserve auction!

~~Topton N1 NAS (2 drive bays, AMD Athlon Pro 300U, 32GB DDR4, TrueNAS SCALE)~~ SOLD!

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There’s a much better Toaster NAS out there, the Topton NAS N1 Pro

If you’re willing to spend about twice as much, there’s a replacement for the NAS that I reviewed: the Topton NAS N1 Pro. While it may be twice the price, its features justify its price:

AMD Ryzen 5 5500U CPU
2x SO-DIMM DDR4 slots (up to 64GB)
2x M.2 NVME slot
2x Drive Bays
2x 2.5Gbps Inteli i226V Network Adapters

It’s the same amount of hard drive storage options, supports up to twice the RAM, comes with a much faster network adapter, but winds up right around twice the price of its predecessor. It’s more expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. I think it is a really good option—I just think it’s a tad bit expensive for what I wanted to use it for: an off-site NAS or the EconoNAS.

Topton NAS N1 Pro on Amazon

If you’re interested in spending around $400 on a DIY NAS, you should definitely check out the DIY NAS: EconoNAS 2023. Assuming that you’re willing to invest some time into building it, it’s a much better NAS for this price point.

Conclusion

What do you all think? Are you like me and wish that the Topton N1 NAS were in stock? Does the Topton N1 PRO NAS appeal to you more? Or are you like me and you’d rather build the DIY NAS: 2023 EconoNAS? Join us in the #diynas-and-homelab channel on the Butter, What?! Discord server and tell us what you think!