The UPS is a better deal off the better insurance alone. Ignoring the additional feature, you get twice the insurance for the same price.

There really is no downside. The batteries are replaceable. There is a door to do it so even doing so won’t void the warranty or lock you out of support (unless you attempt another way of doing so).

Only thing I can’t confirm is the UPS surge protection power rating (as in how much power above the standard current you are protected/insured against).

Checkmk

They labeled all the cabling correctly in my house, BUT all the matching labeling for the cables at the terminal box was fully exposed to the elements and just written in sharpie. So at the terminal, all the labels are just blank.

Do you know what cooler will be in the pc?

You’ll likely be fine with just about any 360 aio and any solid air cooler. Air coolers from noctua, thermalright, and deepcool seem to be go tos and will serve you well.

Going into the bios and using a -100 mV undervolt will help you avoid most thermal throttling (tho unlikely unless you’re really hitting the cpu hard with the aforementioned coolers) and a similar setting in XTU will do the same.

Undervolting will surely prevent all of your mentioned concerns, but you’ll also be fine without touching any of that as long as the cooler isn’t something rated lower than or just barely meeting the wattage of the cpu and, also, it’s not being stuffed into a sffpc or very small case with proper case airflow.

TLDR; I’d recommend the i7 for overall peace of mind and performance and provided the base cooling isn’t being skimped or overlooked, you’ll be fine and happy.

Yeah. Unless I purposefully or accidentally mess something up, my VMs run great without interaction. But either way, I usually have to manually change something to create an unstable vm.

1. Check your host syslog (it’s available in the GUI) and it should give you an idea of why the VMs are hanging.

2. Have you considered a high availability cluster? It’s literally the tool that exists for what you want.

PBS is cool for like a disaster recovery scenario, but it shouldn’t be the tool you go to for frequently unstable VMs. That’d be a fabric bandaid at best, but leaning heavily to a liquid bandaid in practice.

Why not a purple? It’s even advertised for exactly this use case