I paid for and don’t regret Plex pass so I could access PlexAmp. It’s quite nice. Will it be worth the price for others? I’m not sure.

To just get started I’d take a trip to your local thrift store. Some decent old PC tower and a large harddrive is more than enough to get started, play around and get it working. Opt for an intel CPU with “quicksync” if you can as it will do hardware trans coding without a dedicated GPU (like I have).

Its about 200W. So about as much as a mid-range gaming PC while playing a 3D game. And that’s including all the networking devices and PoE delivery.

frick… I cant find the item name at the moment. I do recall though when i sourced it I was looking for a dust resistant cabinet. so their are no grills anywhere except at the top and bottom for 120mm fans. I installed filtered fans to hopefully keep dust to a minimum. If I remember I’ll snipe the brand-name later.

by power optimization I assume you mean like overclock tuning on the mother boards and adjusting sleep schedules, HDD sleep timing and the like? I admit I haven’t done much of that. just stock power and sleep settings.

to my knowledge the UPS draws less than 5W… (maybe just phantom power for the LCD and small onboard controller) although I haven’t measured it in isolation.

yep, thats exactly right:) (and the Quadro was a work hand-me-down so the price of $0 was unbeatable)

They are “thin” monoprice patch cables. Corey at mactelecom uses them all over the place so I gave them a shot. They dont hold up to a “true” cat 6 spec but as long as they are short (like this, 6") they don’t attenuate the signal enough to be noticed.

Last I checked it was ~200W on average for everything and only gets up to about 250W when the main server is pegged at 100% usage.

I believe you are missing warhammer and anime