You see what happens, Larry?

You see what happens?

This is what happens, Larry. This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps. This is what happens when you feed a stoner scrambled eggs.

You are probably fortunate enough to live in an area with not a lot of wireless interference, or don’t have a lot of wireless devices on your network, or all your devices are rather modern.

You can have good wireless…it won’t be as good as wired, never will or can be. By it’s very nature it has to be a shared medium, which by it’s very nature must be half duplex. Then there is the matter of sharing time with other stations on the same channel (and not necessarily on your network or under your control).

But for most things it can easily be “good enough”. Certainly wouldn’t run a server on wireless. Generally worse performance for realtime voice/video/gaming as well, because latency and jitter matter, and by having to share the channel with other stations, jitter is a fact of life.

And unsteady wireless is the #1 cause of VPN complaints in my office. By a very wide margin. Miraculously the problem always goes away as soon as they plug in.

But for casual web browsing, occasional large downloads (there’s a reason mobile apps don’t really show you how many B/s your transferring), streaming media…yeah, wireless can easily be good enough.

Yeah the SFFs and uSFFs are great for consuming low power.

I’ve got a couple m910q’s that I bought for htpc purposes but honestly I might be better off putting the thick ones on htpc duty. Just gotta work out some kinks with how they handle suspend when hooked up to a TV.

They’ve really shot up in price…I bought two for 130 shipped (total) with i5-7500T and 16gb back around last Halloween. I’m seeing singles not specced as well for the same price

The tough thing about uSFF is that they usually don’t have any PCIe slots…so if you need a second NIC, or want to upgrade to mGig, you can’t, or they have to be over USB 3.

This.

I look for corporate desktops that are off-lease or EoL. Big fan of Lenovo M series. 6th/7th gen still have lots of life left in them and plenty of power for most homelab tasks.

Anything much newer than that will consume less power per core (usually) but will cost more up front and probably be more expensive to put upgrades into (i.e. DDR5). Anything much older than that won’t be worth the performance per watt. By the time you put a 7th gen through its paces, you’ll be ready to upgrade and have a much clearer look at what you want/need.

Right now I’ve got 3x M710s forming a kubernetes cluster, and another running opnsense only.

Kubernetes was built on top of VMs in proxmox, but I’m thinking I will move them to metal.

I also have what was my PC down in the basement, with proxmox, running a TrueNAS VM and a Bazzite VM for GPU passthrough and Sunshine, but I’m gonna reclaim those guts, put a spare 6th gen with DDR3 and run TrueNAS on metal. Then I’ll have my PC back.