Hi Phil, this is unrelated to the video but I wanted to say thank you for still hosting old software/executables on your site. Recently I needed something for a program and the official download is no longer available, but I found it on your website. And thank you for making all these amazing videos, it is because of you that I developed a great interest in retro PC gaming a few years ago
How do you pronounce your company name? Asu-store or asus-tore? I presume your brand has nothing to do with Asus so probably Asu-store (as in as-you-store)
@@RealGengarTV "Founded in 2011, ASUSTOR Inc. was established via direct investment from ASUSTeK Computer Inc. The ASUSTOR brand name was created as a portmanteau of “ASUS” and “Storage”."
Thanks for what you do Phil! For storage I just use a PC running Linux with ZFS filesystem support, with a AMD 5600G CPU, 64gb ddr4. I've got 3 8tb 3.5" 7200rpm NAS drives running in raidz1, so 16tb storage. Planning on getting 2 more 8tb NAS 3.5" drives and going to raidz2 for 24tb storage. On my main PC I'm using a Intel a750 GPU to do all my video encoding, and it does a great job.
Worth considering a 30 series Geforce card for the Optiplex? Even a 3060 should help with the video encoding / decoding.That 10 series card is just outdated at this point, if you're doing 4K.
I have that exact asustor nas unit. Setup with 4x 6TB drives in Raid 5. It has been running for about 2.5 years so far without a hitch. Just be sure to put it on a good battery backup in case of power failures to protect the drives and data.
Interesting to see your latest ipdate, Phil. I work in IT at a college and we've been recycling hundreds of Optiplex 5060s over the last year. We had fairly high rates of failure on that model. Power supplies, TPMs, general motherboard failures. We have had MUCH better luck with the newer Optiplex 5000 mid-towers. They are still i5 processors but a couple generations newer. Likely underpowered for serious video editing, but work great in our classrooms. Have you considered building your own rather than buying used OEM? It doesn't have to be crazy expensive. Decent Intel i7-10th gen or AMD Ryzen 7 5000-series processors, paired with an Nvidia RTX 3060 or better, should be reasonably affordable on a $100US motherboard.
When you said that this Opitplex has only a i5 8500 I got a little worried about work flow in terms of Video Editing... Well, the easiest choice would be using the MiniPC and Optiplex 5060 at the same time, one for capturing stuff and another for editing... Sounds Complex and probably annoying to deal with, but at least that'd be easier for me.
I just used a Raspberry Pi(I got mine before prices went crazy) with a couple of 6TB(at the time, 6TB was the best £ per TB ratio) HDDs running OMV. It's really slow, but I have it set to do the job of backing up the C: drive of every computer in the house overnight once a month and it's always done by morning, so the speed isn't affecting me.
Please drop a video on that Asustor NAS setup and how it works! I have one but it's literally still in the box on my shelf. I have been shuffling around USB drive caddies for my audio and video needs with multiple installs of games across my network and I have a feeling that Asustor situation would be better. It might force me to set my own up!
I guess I don't know what prices are like in Australia, but have you considered a used am4 board and building an editing/capture rig around that? The boards are fairly inexpensive and the prices on the higher end ryzen chips are starting to come down quite a bit. Otherwise that machine does support up to a 9th gen i5. Not sure if it'll make much of a difference though.
Always love seeing a new video up from you i too have ran into atorage issues when it comes to drivers etc annd have had horrible luck with dying drives as of late with really no idea of how to go about it in terms of being accessible across 40 years of hardware. Ive been turning to old disc burning for now lol but its getting more and more difficult to even find them. Also any ideas on a K6-2 333 installed in a V70MA-95 the integrated GPU impressed me ao im wondering if its even worth throwing in a PCI card
I've got a Debian 12 virtual machine that runs SAMBA configured for legacy compatibility, and netatalk 2 for classic mac file sharing as well. Allows me to browse file systems, mount ISOs (in windows/mac os), and run applications directly in DOS, legacy windows, OS/2, and classic Mac OS without having to download anything and manage space on the local drives. I wonder if the NAS could be set up this way
Pretty nice NAS, but I'll try my hands on a JonsBo N2/N3 next because it should be cheaper and I also want to use it as a VM server ( such as with Proxmox ). The processing power you seek should be in such a build as well, and the N3 even should bundle well with something like an Intel Arc A380 for (video) encoding needs. ;-)
So if you look at some of the used 1L business PCs, some of those have a pci-e slot single slot low profile which might work for some capture cards. Not sure about cooling the capture card as the only airflow is for the cpu. There is also the minisform ms-01 which has a half height single slot pci-e slot, but I've been reading online those systems seem to be suffering from stability issues for a while and they can get quite loud under a heavy load. The 1L PCs aren't to bad for pricing if you go used off ebay in the USA, No idea what pricing will be like over there.
If I wanted to build something on the cheap for this purpose I would buy an used 3950X or 5950X and maybe slap a 3060 on it to have the latest codecs, that should be pretty decent video editing for the budget I think. Of course is going to cost more than the OptiPlex for sure, but its going to be miles more performant than it and the mini PCs as well being a desktop chip.
I'm building a windows 98 myself and I've got quite a few parts already and I'm buying what I'm missing, but i found two cpus at grandma's house a pentium 4 at 2.66ghz and a celeron also at 2.66ghz, so which one should i use?
@@philscomputerlab thank you! I'll be back playing dos and early windows games like it's 2010 again! I was a little kid back then and I remember playing on windows 98 on the computer at grandma's house and playing on XP at home, time for some good old doom again!
Phil - what are your thoughts on using cheap, low spec (plenty for DOS games that is) SBCs to make a LAN for retro gaming? I can see this working using DOSbox and IPX protocol between the emulated PCs, and with SBCs there'd be plenty of IO for KVM to get several folks together for a 90's style LAN. I don't recall any particular videos on these from yourself, with the retrogaming perspective at least.
Wow, I didn't expect the i5 8500 to be that slow for video editing, considering it's a 6 core CPU. Maybe upgrading to an i7 8700K would prove sufficient since it supports hyperthreading.🤔
for encode H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4 8-10bit you need a min nvidia 1660 if you can find a used one to experiment but i will go for a 3060 12gb as a better option
@@philscomputerlab invest on the Intel Arc GPU. It can decode/encode anything currently on the market including 4:4:4 HEVC. They are also not expensive and quite power efficient.
Cool lab... Think about getting an Apple PC... Or you could get a Gen 12 or 13 with i7 or i9 and install MacOS... You could even get the PC in dual boot Apple and Windows... and using Apple studio software... Just an idea... How I know is I did it on my own Xeon 24 core, 128GB ram, dual AMD workstation card link together and 4TB Nvme and a NAS system similar to yours... =8-)
Kind of unfortunate, that your mini-pc doesn't have an OCuLink port, otherwise you could use one of the many docks/adapters out there for a capture card!
Intel really is still the best when it comes to video processing in formats other than the basic consumer 4:2:0. IIRC they even accelerate 4:2:2 in some codecs which even the latest NVIDIA chips don't do.
I was wondering about that. I searched and can't find a definitive answer if Quicksync in OBS s Let's me encode 4:4:4. AMD just doesn't do anything past 4:2:0 and NVIDIA seems to be the gold standard, it just works. So I usually just use software encoder as it never has such limitations, but needs a good CPU.
Phil, I do agree that parts like GTX 1050 and 8th generation i5 processor are getting long in the tooth. Lacking a lot of the new instruction sets. Two of my work PC's are 8th generation Intel PC's and they do pretty well, but for intensive stuff it's going to fall flat. It's kind of sad that a lot of PC's like this, and even some that have 6th and 7th generation processors which can't run win 11 with full support, are starting to fall behind, and they will have no retro appeal in the future, thanks, or maybe not thanks to microsoft and most software windows vista and above being fully compatible with windows 11, there's not much reason for the in betweens in these eras! There is very very little that won't run on 11 that runs on Vista, it's an e waste nightmare, and there's nothing special about an old computer unless it can run XP or 98 or something cool like that. When I get something old at work I cross my fingers that it's something that can run XP and 98 and stuff like that and not have blown caps, those get kept. You wouldn't believe how many computers I've cloned over to systems like that.
When you said you got a Dell off duplex and we're talking about Windows 3.11, I thought it's going to be an old retro Dell that you use for only those purposes. Kind of assumed you had a modern computer which you used for capture and editing. It's a little strange that someone in your position is trying to jury rig a PCI Express capture card through the m.2 slot of a mini PC. Why not just invest in a good high power PC which will last you years?
Why not build your own PC instead of trying to add all kinds of adapters and external stuff? You dont need the newest CPU and GPU, but something that's upgradable down the road but would work for you at the moment instead. I mean I would have expected you building your own with all the experience with building retro computers 😊
A range of reasons. Cost being one, but also I love the simplicity of OEMs and Mini PCs. The current Mini PC has no free M.2 slot, so I'm reviewing a new one...
Hi Phil, this is unrelated to the video but I wanted to say thank you for still hosting old software/executables on your site. Recently I needed something for a program and the official download is no longer available, but I found it on your website. And thank you for making all these amazing videos, it is because of you that I developed a great interest in retro PC gaming a few years ago
Thank you!
Oh that site saved more than once! I am very grateful as well.
G'day Phil,
I like the extra BTS Tuesday video, seeing the tech you are using to make the retro content is also interesting
Your videos are almost always fantastic. Keep up the good work.
Which ones are not? ;-P
@@MatthewHill No one is perfect.👌
1:45 I know what to share. Windows XP on an Ivy Bridge platform with an SSD using an XP-compatible 10GbE card.
How do you pronounce your company name?
Asu-store or asus-tore? I presume your brand has nothing to do with Asus so probably Asu-store (as in as-you-store)
They missed big time, that should be ASUS-Store
@@RealGengarTV From my short google search, it actually seems that they're owned by ASUS
@@RealGengarTV "Founded in 2011, ASUSTOR Inc. was established via direct investment from ASUSTeK Computer Inc. The ASUSTOR brand name was created as a portmanteau of “ASUS” and “Storage”."
It definitely is related, Asus created Asustor @@RealGengarTV
Thanks for what you do Phil! For storage I just use a PC running Linux with ZFS filesystem support, with a AMD 5600G CPU, 64gb ddr4. I've got 3 8tb 3.5" 7200rpm NAS drives running in raidz1, so 16tb storage. Planning on getting 2 more 8tb NAS 3.5" drives and going to raidz2 for 24tb storage. On my main PC I'm using a Intel a750 GPU to do all my video encoding, and it does a great job.
Worth considering a 30 series Geforce card for the Optiplex? Even a 3060 should help with the video encoding / decoding.That 10 series card is just outdated at this point, if you're doing 4K.
I have that exact asustor nas unit. Setup with 4x 6TB drives in Raid 5. It has been running for about 2.5 years so far without a hitch. Just be sure to put it on a good battery backup in case of power failures to protect the drives and data.
Thank you for your support!
Tuesday Bonus video!
Interesting to see your latest ipdate, Phil. I work in IT at a college and we've been recycling hundreds of Optiplex 5060s over the last year. We had fairly high rates of failure on that model. Power supplies, TPMs, general motherboard failures.
We have had MUCH better luck with the newer Optiplex 5000 mid-towers. They are still i5 processors but a couple generations newer. Likely underpowered for serious video editing, but work great in our classrooms.
Have you considered building your own rather than buying used OEM? It doesn't have to be crazy expensive. Decent Intel i7-10th gen or AMD Ryzen 7 5000-series processors, paired with an Nvidia RTX 3060 or better, should be reasonably affordable on a $100US motherboard.
I just love the simplicity of OEMs and Mini PCs!
@@philscomputerlab Often our greatest creativity is found when working within a set of limitations. Probably why retro computing is so much fun!
What a beast!
I have all the stuff to test capture card over M.2 to PCIE adapter. I'll make a video about it Friday.
When you said that this Opitplex has only a i5 8500 I got a little worried about work flow in terms of Video Editing... Well, the easiest choice would be using the MiniPC and Optiplex 5060 at the same time, one for capturing stuff and another for editing... Sounds Complex and probably annoying to deal with, but at least that'd be easier for me.
The Mini PC should be up and running soon. Just waiting for some standoffs so it looks a bit less Frankenstein, but I'm getting there...
@@Super123456789Kuba why miniPC, big PC can be so much better
@@A-BYTE94 Not when it's 8Gen Big PC vs. Mini PC with... I'm guessing either Zen 4 Ryzen, or Intel 14-13Gen.
I just used a Raspberry Pi(I got mine before prices went crazy) with a couple of 6TB(at the time, 6TB was the best £ per TB ratio) HDDs running OMV. It's really slow, but I have it set to do the job of backing up the C: drive of every computer in the house overnight once a month and it's always done by morning, so the speed isn't affecting me.
Please drop a video on that Asustor NAS setup and how it works! I have one but it's literally still in the box on my shelf. I have been shuffling around USB drive caddies for my audio and video needs with multiple installs of games across my network and I have a feeling that Asustor situation would be better. It might force me to set my own up!
"One of these days" I really need to network my retro machines together with a network share usb hard drive for easy file sharing...
I guess I don't know what prices are like in Australia, but have you considered a used am4 board and building an editing/capture rig around that? The boards are fairly inexpensive and the prices on the higher end ryzen chips are starting to come down quite a bit. Otherwise that machine does support up to a 9th gen i5. Not sure if it'll make much of a difference though.
For a range of reasons, it's just not on the cards to buy parts and build custom. But yes you are right custom would be the way to go...
Always love seeing a new video up from you i too have ran into atorage issues when it comes to drivers etc annd have had horrible luck with dying drives as of late with really no idea of how to go about it in terms of being accessible across 40 years of hardware. Ive been turning to old disc burning for now lol but its getting more and more difficult to even find them. Also any ideas on a K6-2 333 installed in a V70MA-95 the integrated GPU impressed me ao im wondering if its even worth throwing in a PCI card
I've got a Debian 12 virtual machine that runs SAMBA configured for legacy compatibility, and netatalk 2 for classic mac file sharing as well. Allows me to browse file systems, mount ISOs (in windows/mac os), and run applications directly in DOS, legacy windows, OS/2, and classic Mac OS without having to download anything and manage space on the local drives. I wonder if the NAS could be set up this way
Low profile cards with NVENC decoders and encoders might be ok combined with a more modern i5 or AMD CPU for your editing needs.
Don't know if you can find a mini pc with thunderbolt then use a thunderbolt PCI egpu dock.
Pretty nice NAS, but I'll try my hands on a JonsBo N2/N3 next because it should be cheaper and I also want to use it as a VM server ( such as with Proxmox ).
The processing power you seek should be in such a build as well, and the N3 even should bundle well with something like an Intel Arc A380 for (video) encoding needs. ;-)
cant you put in a 2nd hand Quadro GPU to help with video encoding / editing?
Yes Afaik starting with a 1650 it has a newer generation of NVENC...
@@philscomputerlab oh so you use the 1650 now for video encoding / decoding and it works ok and much faster than the CPU encoding/decoding?
So if you look at some of the used 1L business PCs, some of those have a pci-e slot single slot low profile which might work for some capture cards. Not sure about cooling the capture card as the only airflow is for the cpu. There is also the minisform ms-01 which has a half height single slot pci-e slot, but I've been reading online those systems seem to be suffering from stability issues for a while and they can get quite loud under a heavy load. The 1L PCs aren't to bad for pricing if you go used off ebay in the USA, No idea what pricing will be like over there.
Low profile is just too limiting. Has to be a tower model with x16 and x4 slot, that gives the best options :)
If I wanted to build something on the cheap for this purpose I would buy an used 3950X or 5950X and maybe slap a 3060 on it to have the latest codecs, that should be pretty decent video editing for the budget I think. Of course is going to cost more than the OptiPlex for sure, but its going to be miles more performant than it and the mini PCs as well being a desktop chip.
@Phil, Maybe you could build a dual Socket 2011 encoding box with a ton of cores from AliEx ?
Absolutely, but the IPC / single core performance will still be horrible. So the actual editing will be frustratingly slow...
Curious: What edit package do you use? Premiere, Resolve, iMovie?
(Super impressed if you use iMovie.)
I can see ShotCut interface in this and last video, but it's likely he only uses it for basic editing.
Shortcut!
Do you have a cold, Phil?
Yeah I wondered about the deep/lower pitched voice as well
I didn't feel it at the time, but it got worse over the day 😒😒
@@philscomputerlab Get well soon!
I'm building a windows 98 myself and I've got quite a few parts already and I'm buying what I'm missing, but i found two cpus at grandma's house a pentium 4 at 2.66ghz and a celeron also at 2.66ghz, so which one should i use?
Pentium 4! The Celerons are always very crippled!
@@philscomputerlab thank you! I'll be back playing dos and early windows games like it's 2010 again! I was a little kid back then and I remember playing on windows 98 on the computer at grandma's house and playing on XP at home, time for some good old doom again!
Phil - what are your thoughts on using cheap, low spec (plenty for DOS games that is) SBCs to make a LAN for retro gaming? I can see this working using DOSbox and IPX protocol between the emulated PCs, and with SBCs there'd be plenty of IO for KVM to get several folks together for a 90's style LAN. I don't recall any particular videos on these from yourself, with the retrogaming perspective at least.
Interesting! I have no experience with SBC (yet) but I have heard good things!
@@philscomputerlab Good, because at least that means I'm not completely hopeless at searching your videos :)
Great
Wow, I didn't expect the i5 8500 to be that slow for video editing, considering it's a 6 core CPU. Maybe upgrading to an i7 8700K would prove sufficient since it supports hyperthreading.🤔
for encode H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4 8-10bit you need a min nvidia 1660 if you can find a used one to experiment but i will go for a 3060 12gb as a better option
This is the weird thing, the 1050 can ENCODE 4:4:4 but cannot decode it. AMD seems even worse, only doing 4:2:0...
@@philscomputerlab invest on the Intel Arc GPU. It can decode/encode anything currently on the market including 4:4:4 HEVC. They are also not expensive and quite power efficient.
Cool lab... Think about getting an Apple PC... Or you could get a Gen 12 or 13 with i7 or i9 and install MacOS... You could even get the PC in dual boot Apple and Windows... and using Apple studio software... Just an idea... How I know is I did it on my own Xeon 24 core, 128GB ram, dual AMD workstation card link together and 4TB Nvme and a NAS system similar to yours... =8-)
Kind of unfortunate, that your mini-pc doesn't have an OCuLink port, otherwise you could use one of the many docks/adapters out there for a capture card!
Yes, it doesn't even have a second M.2 slot, so I'll be reviewing a new model soon. It has a second M.2 and that will give me some options...
Intel really is still the best when it comes to video processing in formats other than the basic consumer 4:2:0.
IIRC they even accelerate 4:2:2 in some codecs which even the latest NVIDIA chips don't do.
I was wondering about that. I searched and can't find a definitive answer if Quicksync in OBS s
Let's me encode 4:4:4. AMD just doesn't do anything past 4:2:0 and NVIDIA seems to be the gold standard, it just works. So I usually just use software encoder as it never has such limitations, but needs a good CPU.
Phil, I do agree that parts like GTX 1050 and 8th generation i5 processor are getting long in the tooth. Lacking a lot of the new instruction sets. Two of my work PC's are 8th generation Intel PC's and they do pretty well, but for intensive stuff it's going to fall flat. It's kind of sad that a lot of PC's like this, and even some that have 6th and 7th generation processors which can't run win 11 with full support, are starting to fall behind, and they will have no retro appeal in the future, thanks, or maybe not thanks to microsoft and most software windows vista and above being fully compatible with windows 11, there's not much reason for the in betweens in these eras! There is very very little that won't run on 11 that runs on Vista, it's an e waste nightmare, and there's nothing special about an old computer unless it can run XP or 98 or something cool like that. When I get something old at work I cross my fingers that it's something that can run XP and 98 and stuff like that and not have blown caps, those get kept. You wouldn't believe how many computers I've cloned over to systems like that.
When you said you got a Dell off duplex and we're talking about Windows 3.11, I thought it's going to be an old retro Dell that you use for only those purposes.
Kind of assumed you had a modern computer which you used for capture and editing.
It's a little strange that someone in your position is trying to jury rig a PCI Express capture card through the m.2 slot of a mini PC.
Why not just invest in a good high power PC which will last you years?
@@nicolaspeter1679 I do me, you do you.
Upgrade 5060 To I7 9700 Or I5 9500
For some reason 9th gen isn't supported in the 5060. But yes, the i7 would add another 2 cores...
Nitpick, but the thumbnail, as of writing, says "OpitPlex" [sic]. Easily fixable, though!
Fixed, thank you! Dyslexia shining through 😂😂
Why not build your own PC instead of trying to add all kinds of adapters and external stuff? You dont need the newest CPU and GPU, but something that's upgradable down the road but would work for you at the moment instead. I mean I would have expected you building your own with all the experience with building retro computers 😊
A range of reasons. Cost being one, but also I love the simplicity of OEMs and Mini PCs. The current Mini PC has no free M.2 slot, so I'm reviewing a new one...