For the record, it was definitely on. I ended up buying a new PSU to check, and it didn’t help. I then bought a new motherboard and that fixed it. So case solved!

The luck didn’t help haha, I never got that light again, except for occasional split second flashes. I edited some info into the original post, but long story short, after lots of fluffing around in the end it was the motherboard. I got a new one and now I’m back up and running!

Yeah they only have the one trackpad option. I tend to use a mouse anyway.

Probably not much point in getting one if you’re going to build your kids a PC anyway.

By the way I managed to get a light on the motherboard, so it might not be dead after all. I’m planning to get some more thermal paste today and keep tinkering, I might save it yet.

I use a laptop most of the time because then I can sit in a recliner with my feet up. I spend the day at a desk I don’t much fancy doing the same in the evening.

I have a Framework laptop from the first ones they made, which are upgradeable and repairable. Unfortunately they don’t ship to NZ, I got mine by freight forwarding and also got parts a bit later the same way. But now they have cracked down hard on freight forwarding as I recently learned, so I can’t get any more upgrades until they start shipping here (no announced plans).

The problem is either my mobo or CPU is dead, so I can’t run the old system haha.

It sounds like my old system could handle transcoding better if I had enabled the right options, so now I have to decide whether to buy a new motherboard and risk it being the CPU, or just upgrade everything.

I don’t do a lot of gaming these days. When I played Baldur’s Gate 3, once I got to Act 3 I switched to streaming from the desktop to the laptop using the Steam function as my laptop couldn’t handle it. I also don’t do upgrades as frequently as you.

If you had an old mobo and CPU, you could downgrade and keep the NAS running until you had a replacement.

Good point, I didn’t think of that.

Ah I got the wrong impression. Good to know it won’t affect me, cheers.

If a person was ordering them, they would do it in numerical order. Despite these being numbers, the computer is still ordering in alphabetical order.

Doing it the way a person would requires the file manager to understand context, which requires a lot more logic for arguably little benefit.

I note that your season and episode start with 0 as well (S01E05), in order to ensure the alphabetical ordering works. Perhaps you should use 5.0 to solve this in the same way.

I believe it’s correct. If you sort say “A”, “AA”, “AAA” then you get

1. A
2. AA
3. AAA

Because the first character is compared, which are all the same, then the second. The first one has no second character, so it comes first. The second has no third character, so it comes before the third item.

In your scenario, you have:

1. 5
2. 5.5

The first characters are the same, so it looks at the second character. Item 1 has no second character so it comes first.

Scenario 2:

1. 5.5 A
2. 5 A

The first character is the same, so it looks at the second character. The second characters are “.” and " ". The “.” comes first in the character ranking so is shown first.

I think your advantage is needing two machines. Then you can swap stuff between them to test as well.

I gave away my previous build in whole and built a new one. No spare parts 🙁. And my SO and I are generally using laptops day to day, no need for more desktop machines and can’t swap pieces between laptop and desktop.

I don’t think having an old mobo/CPU would help anyway, I’m pretty sure one of the two is broken and swapping both out won’t help work out which one.

Oh I didn’t realise I could do that! You first link seems to say there is quite limited codec support though?

I bought a multimeter and tested the PSU, and it all seems fine. So pretty sure it’s the motherboard or CPU.

I’m using it as an excuse to do an upgrade, so will probably get a new mobo/CPU/RAM.

Ah that does look like good bang for buck! Thanks!

Yip. Have tested the PSU with a multimeter and it’s fine. Narrowed it down to the CPU or motherboard. I decided I’ll just do a bit of an upgrade and get a new CPU, motherboard, RAM.

Oh wow that’s awesome. Shame that someone told me about all the issues with recent intel CPUs. I’ll probably go AMD again.

Probably not this one. I was a little disappointed with how little airflow this can gives me. In any case, I don’t think I spun any CPU fans around much at all.

Aw man. So I want quick sync for better hardware transcoding but of course that doesn’t matter if the chip is melting so probably go for a recent AMD CPU instead even though it doesn’t have quick sync it should have hardware transcoding capabilities almost as good. OK, I’ll start looking at AMD again.

Looking at the intel CPU I linked above, that whole series doesn’t come with a cooler. I’ve never done a build that didn’t come with a CPU/cooler bundle. How do I know which cooler will provide enough cooling for that chip? Not what is compatible, but what will actually be enough to stop it thermal throttling?

Yeah seems a bit overkill, I would think the integrated quick sync would be more along the lines of what I need.

Does intel/AMD matter? I have heard intel has special hardware for transcoding (Quick sync) - does this mean I should go for an intel CPU or is there an AMD equivalent? And am I prioritising number of cores over core speed?

How much RAM is enough (at what point do I prioritise spending on CPU over the RAM). I currently have 16GB but was thinking maybe 64GB? You say SSD writes aren’t that relevant anymore but I have killed a few SSDs in my time so I think it’s still relevant!

Edit: Maybe a CPU like this? https://nz.pcpartpicker.com/product/xNXV3C/intel-core-ultra-5-245k-42-ghz-14-core-processor-bx80768245k

That is a recent CPU that has 14 cores and the most recent version of quick sync. It’s been a long time since I had intel, or even since I last did a build, so a bit out of the loop on what I should be looking for.

Don’t mind the $NZD, looks worse than it is (though the exchange rate is a killer at the moment)