Thoughts on Lian-Li PC-Q25B Builds


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The other thing I would like to change is the power LED. Is there any way to dim it?

 

I'd like to get one of the silver cases as well, but they're hard to find.

 

As for the power LED ... it's not necessary to connect it to the motherboard.  That won't "dim it" ... it will simply be off.  You could also cover it with a small piece of window tinting => you can often get free or very-low-cost samples from an automobile tinting business.

 

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I've been browsing the web quite a bit to find inspiration and ideas especially on the cable management. One of the coolest collections of build pics I found was here in Moddiy.com site: http://www.moddiy.com/pages/PC-Showcases.html

 

Those are all very nice but I prefer the plain black box look. I think one thing you will eventually get into will be customizing and sleeving your cables & wires. It really is simple and doesn't require much of an investment in tools & materials. You will finally be able to get things the length you want and they will look better than you can imagine.

 

The other thing I would like to change is the power LED. Is there any way to dim it?

 

Splice one of these into the Led+ wire >>> 1K Ohm 1/2 watt potentiometer

 

That is very small so it would be easy to mount in or on your case, and you would always be able to dial the brightness up or down. If you prefer to have a permanent, (and cheaper), solution use the potentiometer to dial the brightness you want and then measure the resistance across the 2 terminals. Use that measurement to source a 1/4 watt resistor to splice into the Led+ line.

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Splice one of these into the Led+ wire >>> 1K Ohm 1/2 watt potentiometer

 

That is very small so it would be easy to mount in or on your case, and you would always be able to dial the brightness up or down. If you prefer to have a permanent, (and cheaper), solution use the potentiometer to dial the brightness you want and then measure the resistance across the 2 terminals. Use that measurement to source a 1/4 watt resistor to splice into the Led+ line.

Would it be possible to utilize a potentiometer based fan controller like this: http://dvtests.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IMG_8251.jpg

It would solve the mounting and also provide easy access to the potentiometer. I agree that a fixed value resistor would perhaps be the optimal solution.

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Splice one of these into the Led+ wire >>> 1K Ohm 1/2 watt potentiometer

 

That is very small so it would be easy to mount in or on your case, and you would always be able to dial the brightness up or down. If you prefer to have a permanent, (and cheaper), solution use the potentiometer to dial the brightness you want and then measure the resistance across the 2 terminals. Use that measurement to source a 1/4 watt resistor to splice into the Led+ line.

Would it be possible to utilize a potentiometer based fan controller like this: http://dvtests.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IMG_8251.jpg

It would solve the mounting and also provide easy access to the potentiometer. I agree that a fixed value resistor would perhaps be the optimal solution.

 

The problem with using a resistor is that they only come in certain values, and you're dealing with such a small amount of resistance that it may not be possible to get the "perfect" amount of brightness.  Oh great, now you have got me wondering how tough it would be to wire in a photo cell so the Led would dim when the lights are low.

 

Anyhow, ya I guess the fan control would work. What you want is for the potentiometer to have a low head of resistance, which is why I spec'd 1k. The resistance you are trying to target is probably between 300-500 ohms so 1k will give you a good range to adjust within. If you were to use a 100k potentiometer then you are trying to dial in within 1/2% of its range. Ya?

 

I'm not sure I would want a wire fed to the back but that is a nice way to mount whatever you use. I would probably mount it on the backplane side, low near the front. That way you could deal with all of the front fan/led/power wires in one spot at one time.

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Not all LEDs are dimmable ... some either fire or not.  But as long as it's dimmable, a potentiometer is a good idea, except for the question of where to mount it.  Drilling a hole in the case would work, but I'd prefer not to do that.  Mounting it on the back is probably the best idea, but then you've another cable to route through the case;  or mounting it inside where you need to remove the side panel would work, but requires popping off the side to adjust.

 

I like the photocell idea => that would almost certainly work for an "auto-adjust" feature ... but then you have the same "where to mount it" issue.  Probably the best choices would be either on the side of the front panel (inside the air vent holds) or on the baffle for the top fan ... both locations would let it "see" the current lighting situation without any external mounting.

 

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garycase..

 

Just wondering why is your PSU fan is not facing toward motherboard?

 

You could mount it either way; but I prefer the way the cables come out with it mounted as I have it; and the PSU airflow doesn't interfere with the airflow design in the case, since it's drawing air from the bottom vent and exhausting it in back.  The CPU fan and the top fan provide PLENTY of airflow in the center ... fed by both the bottom vents and the front vents that have air pulled in by the fan in front of the drive cage.

 

 

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  • 5 weeks later...

I grabbed one of the PC-Q25B's on sale a month or so ago, and am nearly ready to begin assembling all the rest.  Thanks for this great thread. 

 

My one question before I order the rest of the parts, has anyone done anything with virtualizing unraid in one of these boxes?  If it is a matter of a slightly different motherboard and processor it may be worth it, but I'll admit to getting a bit lost with all the virtualization options available.  I've tried searching through the threads in there, but most are doing virtualization with much larger systems.  It looks like the network cards on most ITX boards have issues with esxi or xen.  ITX also limits your expansion opportunities for a separate network card, or for expanding the unraid system with having to deal with storage for the vm's and for the array.

 

If I did virtualization it would just mostly be for isolation, I wouldn't be running anything powerful with it.  Everything that could be running as a unraid plugin would just be a running in one other linux partition so that I could maintain, and upgrade it separately from the unraid system.

 

Maybe I'm just making things too complex, since this is my first unraid system, just looking for input/options before I finish the rest of this.

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has anyone done anything with virtualizing unraid in one of these boxes?

 

I haven't, but I'm sure it could be done.  AsRock has a nice C226-based mini-ITX board that supports ECC RAM and the Xeon E3-1200 v3 series CPUs.  It's a very new board that's still getting frequent BIOS updates to resolve some of the "kinks" ... but it's the only one I've seen that supports ECC RAM and has 6 SATA-3 ports.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157466

 

The excellent Asus H87I-PLUS would probably be fine, although it doesn't support ECC memory.  Asus also ships this with hardware virtualization support disabled in the BIOS, but it's simple to enable it (just a BIOS setting).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132032

 

I've built a couple systems for others using the H87I-Plus (one with an i3, one with an i7-4770).  Coupled with an i7-4770 this is one FAST system  :)    I suspect it would work very nicely virtualized; but I simply haven't tried it.    ... and my personal Q25B setup is Atom-based (for very low power), and not one I could try this on.    I may build another SFF system with this case, but will likely run Windows 7 on it, and use VMware Workstation to host a couple extra systems to "play" with some of the UnRAID add-ons.  With a high-end CPU like an i7-4771 the overhead of a Type 2 hypervisor isn't a big deal for a few VMs.

 

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Thanks, guess I'm still trying to figure out how much I'll do with the system.  I think It'll be just some transcoding, crashplan, and  perhaps some usenet binary decodes.  I was just thinking doing it in a separate virtualized system would help make the system more easily maintained and upgraded with all the changes that seem to be coming to unraid as I read around the forums.

 

But I may just keep it simple and with a lower cash, and power budget by just using an i3, or even a celeron processor and not messing with virtualization.

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But I may just keep it simple and with a lower cash, and power budget by just using an i3, or even a celeron processor and not messing with virtualization.

 

I tend to agree with that approach.  I REALLY like my Atom-based server, which only consumes 20 watts on idle, and never more than ~ 45w even during parity checks.    I use it as a basic NAS (no plugins except the CleanPowerDown and APC UPS control) ... and if I wanted to use a bunch of plugins (Plex, CouchPotato, etc.) I'd simply build another SFF box and put a higher-end CPU in it ... or perhaps even just run it on a VM from my main Windows system (which is always on as well and has PLENTY of "horsepower" (i7-4771 with 16GB).

 

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Thanks everyone for all your help, here's what I ended up with http://pcpartpicker.com/user/skraut/saved/3kgX

 

Some notes:

 

Caught the Disks and Case on sale, I was just waiting until I had the time to decide on the rest of the components.  Caught the CPU on sale today, so that made up my mind.

 

Memory came out of a desktop a year or so ago when I upgraded it to 16gb, I probably would have gone with 8gb in this, but can't argue with "free" ram.  Just hope the large cooling fins on this memory fit inside the case.

 

I realize there are only 2 hard drives, so initially it'll have only 3TB of storage.  The main purpose of this system is to replace an aging arm based ReadyNas duo with fairly new 2TB drives in it, and to move all the plex hosting, and sabnzbd to this unraid server so that I don't have to keep a separate gaming desktop on 24/7.  I'll clean off one of the drives from the ReadyNas, move it over, then repeat the process with the other drive.  The system should then give me room to grow organically as my needs increase, which was the whole point of coming to unRAID initially.

 

Thanks again, I'll post more when the remaining parts get here and I start to get this assembled.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks all.  System is built and currently preclearing the drives.  I'd post pictures, but the ones already in this thread look a little cleaner.  (It's amazing how quickly you can finish up a system build when a 2 year old wakes up from his nap and decides he wants to "help") 

 

I did put the power supply so that the fan faced away from the CPU, and this seemed to work pretty well.  Since this caused all the internal cables to come out near the top of the PSU, it was easy to tuck the unused PCI Express power cables between the top of the PSU and the case. 

 

The question I have so far is that the system reboots into the BIOS on every reboot.  I have to select the boot menu, In there are 2 entries for the USB drive.  One is UEFI, the other is not.  Selecting the UEFI version just causes the system to boot back into the bios.  Selecting the non UEFI version of the USB drive causes unRAID to boot.  Unfortunately the BIOS Boot order only list the UEFI USB Drive which is why the system boots into the BIOS every time..  Has anyone else had this issue?

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I've received quite a few PMs regarding the correct boot settings for Asus H87I-Plus.

1. Go to advanced mode (F7)

2. Select boot menu

3. In "Boot option priorities" enable the non-UEFI usb device under the "Hard drive nnn priorities"

4. Select the non-UEFI usb device in "Boot option #1"

 

The exact name of the device will depend on the USB brand/model but it is always the non-UEFI which works.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi,

 

this is my first post here. I followed this thread and am very impressed with the stuff you guys built.

Now I want to build something that will keep my data secure and also doubles up as Plex Media Server that is able to transcode.

 

From all the lists of parts and descriptions in this thread I made my own shopping list here in Australia.

http://www.pccasegear.com/sc/AC21

Unfortunately the prices are not exactly competitive down here. But it would be great if someone could tell me if all this will work together. I did not find the RAM you guys were talking about and just picked some. I know there are also some cables that I am missing and a SSD for cache would be great. How big should the SSD be?

 

I have not built my own PC since the mid 90s :-)

 

I am planning on using unRAID, Plex, Transmission and probably rsync.

 

Any comments are greatly appreciated.

 

Roland

 

 

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Hi,

 

this is my first post here. I followed this thread and am very impressed with the stuff you guys built.

Now I want to build something that will keep my data secure and also doubles up as Plex Media Server that is able to transcode.

 

From all the lists of parts and descriptions in this thread I made my own shopping list here in Australia.

http://www.pccasegear.com/sc/AC21

Unfortunately the prices are not exactly competitive down here. But it would be great if someone could tell me if all this will work together. I did not find the RAM you guys were talking about and just picked some. I know there are also some cables that I am missing and a SSD for cache would be great. How big should the SSD be?

 

I have not built my own PC since the mid 90s :-)

 

I am planning on using unRAID, Plex, Transmission and probably rsync.

 

Any comments are greatly appreciated.

 

Roland

 

Roland, go straight to 4TB drives, in 12 months time you'll be glad you did, cause you WILL fill those 2TB up real quick.

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From all the lists of parts and descriptions in this thread I made my own shopping list here in Australia.

http://www.pccasegear.com/sc/AC21

Unfortunately the prices are not exactly competitive down here. But it would be great if someone could tell me if all this will work together. I did not find the RAM you guys were talking about and just picked some.

 

I was wondering why you went with a Z87 motherboard until I saw what your choices were, so unless you have other sources I'd pick the same one. The memory you picked is only 1333mhz and the CPU supports 1600mhz, so you could pick faster ram. The ram you chose is also 1.65v and you might want to choose a pair that is 1.5v or lower.

 

I know there are also some cables that I am missing and a SSD for cache would be great. How big should the SSD be?

 

I'd use right angle to straight sata cables with a minimum length of 25cm, 30cm is probably safer. As for the size of the SSD I guesss that really depends on how You are going to use this. I'd guess that 64GB would be fine but 120GB is a better value and would be more future proof. You could also just use a spare spinner drive for a cache while you get things up & running, and then you will know exactly what size SSD will be a good fit for you. The advantages to that route is you don't waste money on space you don't need, you don't shoot yourself in the foot and buy something too small, and the prices of SSD's are going down over time.

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Thanks for the replies.

I did not think of the 2x4TB option but I like that a lot better.

 

I was wondering why you went with a Z87 motherboard until I saw what your choices were, so unless you have other sources I'd pick the same one.

 

I am not sure what you mean by that. The choice of motherboard was driven by the suggestions in the first post here I think. If there is a better option please let me know.

 

Thanks for the cable and memory clarification too. There might be an old drive in the closet to try as cache.

 

Will order these cables: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Red-12-Inch-Latching-SATA-to-Right-Angle-SATA-Serial-ATA-Cable-with-Clip-8-Packs/221354216716

 

Thanks Roland

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I was wondering why you went with a Z87 motherboard until I saw what your choices were, so unless you have other sources I'd pick the same one.

 

I am not sure what you mean by that. The choice of motherboard was driven by the suggestions in the first post here I think. If there is a better option please let me know.

 

Actually the Haswell board I see most recommended is the Asus H87I-PLUS, which has the H87 chipset. The Z87 is the more expensive high end chipset, and I just don't see a single added feature that would be useful for you unless you need Wifi. I'm no expert so maybe someone else is seeing something I'm not.

 

The other day I sorted Haswell Mini ITX boards available from the vender you linked to and I agreed you chose the "best" board available from them. I just checked with them today and something has changed. The Asus H87I-PLUS now ready to ship instead of a pre-order for March delivery. So unless you need a Z87 for some reason I change my vote to this motherboard >>>

 

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=138_1491&products_id=23598

 

If you do go with the Asus mb I recommend using 10" right angle to right angle Sata cables, (or 25cm-30cm). The Sata cables you linked to on eBay will also be fine. If you want, the motherboard comes with 2 black 16" straight to straight Sata cables, so you could just order another one for now.

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