The HP Omen Max 16 is one of the most capable gaming laptops you can buy right now, and it's available with both NVIDIA's RTX 5070 Ti Mobile and RTX 5080 Mobile GPUs. I put both configurations through their paces in Cyberpunk 2077's built-in benchmark at 4K to see how far you can push ray tracing, DLSS upscaling, and the new Multi Frame Generation technology on each GPU.
Both configurations share the same Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX processor, 16GB of system …
Read more →One of the items on my long term to-do list was to put my old hard drive collection to use by creating a network attached storage (NAS) machine. Over several upgrades over the past few years, I had amassed several 500gb-1tb drives both in 2.5' and 3.5' varieties that were collecting dust. The question quickly became- what was the cheapest and most cost effective way to build a NAS?. Specifically, many of the off the shelf solutions such as Synology carried out the duties of a NAS quite well; however, came with many downsides including the lack …
Read more →The importance of having access to a VPN recently dawned on me as I noticed several of the WiFi networks I rely on (primarily at work) block access to several critical tools including e-mail, Google Drive and even certain academic websites that are likely deemed traffic hungry. One way to easily bypass this conundrum is to create your own VPN on a virtual private server of your choosing. I purchased a cheap KVM VPS at BuyVM.net starting at $2.00/month. Next, load up your favorite Linux OS (I usually opt for Debian or Ubuntu) and use the PiVPN …
Read more →I purchased the Dell PowerEdge T20 several years ago for an Unraid server build that I use to back up my data. One of the unfortunate design flaws of this system is the lack of an intake fan for system and specifically hard drive cooling. I had completed this mod around 2016; however, recently I had noticed that my unraid hard drive temperatures were consistently in the 102-110 Farenheight range when they had previously been much lower. I suspected that the intake fan I had installed several years ago had failed and decided to replace it. I also remembered that …
Read more →I was recently putting together a low cost Windows 10 Machine for my dad (post on that to follow) and realized how non-trivial of a task it is to create a bootable windows 10 usb drive using a mac. (If you have a windows machine availiable, simply use the windows 10 installation media creation tool located here) After trying several methods I have put together a quick how-to guide on creating windows 10 installation media (usb) using the latest version of Mac OSX at the moment 10.15. This guide was adapted from this blog.
Open your …
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