Weekly FGO vol. 27

JP

Free SSR for 20M download campaign sure wasn’t expected. Waver is in the roster so most people who want to have easier farming time and don’t have him already will probably pick him.

I got one myself as well. Now I’m only missing Skadi for support with NP charge. Pictured above is my older account which has Waver (and Skadi) already I got more Mordred instead. Blue Saber is useful as well but NP2 SSR seems better.

With this, both my JP and NA accounts have Waver. In same month \o/ April was Waver month.

There’s still no hint of next event…

And lastly, I need to remember finishing Olympus during this 0 AP story campaign.

NA

Apocrypha event is still ongoing. Main story should be ending soon, I think? I’ve emptied the store and the remaining raids don’t have that good of drops so I’ve most stopped, only doing raids when the AP naturally recharged.

I’m still lacking a lot of mats but I think I’ll save my apples for better raid or box events.

Also, it’s May! Which means Okita banner is coming soon. Or not so soon as it’s still at least three weeks away. I’ll have about 150 rolls for her. Hopefully that’ll be enough for at least NP1. NP2 sure would be nice.

Skadi and Okita Alter are coming soon as well. I’ll probably do 10 rolls for Okita Alter and Valkyrie then save the rest for Skadi. Assuming I have anything left after Okita banner, that is.

Weekly FGO vol. 26

Previous event farming

JP

Amazingly still nothing. There will be a special livestream later today so there may be a rerun of something. El Melloi collab event rerun perhaps? That would mean Waver gacha time. Or maybe Kama? We’ll find out in 18 hours.

NA

Apocrypha event has started. Unfortunately the berserker I prepared can barely manage deal enough damage. Maybe enough with LB’d event CE? It’ll still be a while until I gather enough points for it.

No particular servant I want on rate-up so I’ll be skipping that. Still hoping for NP2+ Okita next month ;-; (currently at 450-ish SQ)

Server upgrade (part 2)

So FreeBSD ran stable on my latest Ryzen setup for at least 18 hours. I guess it’s safe to say it’s stable now.

The x1 graphics card has arrived, and it works without problem. It sure is nice having a tiny graphics card. Maybe I should get more of this.

There were small hitch after I changed back the SATA cabling to connect to the HBA. Some of the drives weren’t detected properly for some reason. Fiddled with the cables a bit and thankfully everything came back up normal.

With this, the upgrade is mostly done. Apart of the ethernet card which I’m still waiting for arrival of the ones with correct bracket and ECC RAM which will be a while until I save enough money for.

There’s also SMR drives situation. I recently learned that manufacturers have started switching to SMR drives which has relatively low random write speed. That explained why the resilver time was so horrible back when I upgraded the pool. Thankfully it can buffer some burst load although it’s not always enough for ZFS operations. The read speed should be mostly fine so I’m thinking of keeping these drives until they die which then I’ll buy normal PMR drives for the replacements. Unfortunately, those will be a bit expensive.

Oh, I almost forgot one more upgrade coming whenever this pandemic situation is over. I’m thinking of taking home a pair of 500GB-ish SSD currently sitting idle in work dev server. I can use them for my home partition as the (NVMe) disk is getting full at 70% and my home directory somehow accounts for 100GB (20%) of it. Slightly slower home directory will be a bit sad but it’s better than having full disk.

Unrelated, but looking again, I considered getting X470 motherboard instead of X570. It’s a bit cheaper and doesn’t need fan. It also has better PCIe configuration at x8/x8 instead of my current X570’s x16/x4. Too bad one of the M.2 NVMe slots is only PCIe Gen 2 x2 (the cheap one). That’s a bit on the slower side for NVMe disk. Still, I probably should’ve gone with that one. I might even be able to fit x16 graphics card on the x1 slot. It’s too late now. RIP me.

There’s also the ASRock Ryzen server motherboard which price quite a lot lower than I thought at 30k. But that one is, well, more expensive. And involves buying directly overseas.

Server upgrade

Not the final form

I’ve been considering this on and off quite a long time ago as I noticed the Intel part post-Ivy Bridge isn’t going to get much cheaper. And then during my 10Gbit upgrade a while back, I learned my server could barely handle half of 10Gbit available. There’s also problem with I need a bit more RAM but I don’t want to buy any more DDR3 sticks as it’s a dead platform by now.

Thankfully Ryzen continued AMD’s tradition (?) of not locking ECC feature on most systems so I upgraded to it three years ago. And my server crashed. A lot. It was unstable. I then tried again two years ago but it’s still crashing. I ended up selling the system and bought a cheap Ivy Bridge server board from ebay last year. It held up pretty well. It even got NVMe upgrade earlier this year.

The thing is, just like for desktop, I sure could use faster CPU. Ryzen 3000 series brought along a lot of per-core performance (IPC) increase. A lot more compared to 1000 series. And it has gotten pretty cheap, at least on 6 cores realm.

I upgraded my desktop end of last year and now it’s turn for the server. Except unlike the desktop one, there’s no good deal this time around. It didn’t help I need more PCIe slots than usually available on cheap motherboard. And I actually wondered if I should wait for B550 and see how it goes especially considering X570 requires fan for its southbridge.

But I ended up getting X570 anyway because I don’t want to wait longer 🙂 I’ve resumed doing some hobby dev work recently and sure could use some upgrade. Especially as my plan for VM on desktop system with NFS-backed storage didn’t go quite well.

Anyway, I upgraded the motherboard (ASRock X570 Pro4) and CPU (AMD Ryzen 5 3500). For RAM I took two sticks from my desktop which currently has a bit too many. Those will need to be upgraded to ECC sometime later when the budget permits.

For graphics card, as this isn’t a server board and there’s no onboard GPU on the CPU, I’m getting a cheap PCIe x1 GT 710 1GiB from Zotac. It costed a bit under 5k on Amazon Outlet. It’s second hand but should be fine. I hope. It’s not arrived yet so I’m currently using another fanless GPU I have but it’s using one x16 slot as even though the PCIe x1 slots are open-ended, there isn’t enough clearance for x16 card.

With one of the only two x16 slots used by the graphics card, I stuck with using my HBA at x1 slot. Thankfully the motherboard has loads of SATA ports (8) so I only need two from the HBA. There’s no cable management though as 1) it’s temporary; and 2) it’s way more annoying with 10 SATA cables in total instead of just two SFF-8087 and two SATA. That should be fixed this weekend.

There’s also network card bracket problem. The brackets I mentioned weeks ago have finally arrived but the size didn’t match. Good job, Fujitsu. I couldn’t find the brackets for those cards either so I’m getting another pair of cards. Assuming they will actually arrive as they’ve been stuck in China for a bit over two weeks now. I just hope they actually arrive. And that they actually work. That would be nice.

The unused board and CPU and RAM will be repurposed for my work dev server. My current one is pretty similar just one generation behind (E3-1235 vs E3-1230v2). I need a new case and PSU though but those shouldn’t be too expensive. Combined, the server will have plenty of RAM (32GiB).

That said, I don’t know if this 3000 series of Ryzen is finally stable enough for FreeBSD. That’s actually the most important thing as otherwise I’ll be forced back to the old system and maybe figure out what to do with this board and CPU. I’ll report back when I got the correct graphics card, I guess. Or earlier if it still crashes.

Bonus photo:

This is definitely not how to install a card. It does work though

Weekly FGO vol. 25

JP

There’s… nothing I can remember of for this week. All I did was just farming for mana prisms as usual.

NA

Journey to the west is ending soon. I finished all the quests, only need to farm.

The challenge quest was not too bad. Mainly thanks to it’s only against single servant.

As for the roll for Waver, thankfully I got one. Not in 20 rolls as I mentioned last week though. It took me 91 rolls total. Thankfully I got two Nezha and two Wu Zetian in the process. No Kaleidoscope though.

I guess with this I’m ready for the Apocrypha raid event. Mostly.

Weekly FGO vol. 24

JP

Lostbelt no. 5 part 2, Olympus, has been released. I’m somehow halfway through it at chapter 13.

Nothing much else otherwise. Chapter 11 boss fight was kind of fun. Or not. The debuff is just annoying. At least it’s doable with solo Enkidu.

NA

Journey to the west has started. It’s farming time (when is it not).

Waver banner is sometime today. I’ll spend 20 tickets this time around. Hopefully that’s enough. Probably not.

Weekly FGO vol. 23

JP

Apocrypha rerun done. Including the challenge quest which was relatively easy. The most difficult part is if Amakusa got to release his NP but that’s about it. It’s even easier with two skadi, one waver, and one zerklot (as seen above).

Apparently I did 10 pulls for Astolfo (saber) but got nothing as usual.

Up next is Olympus. I haven’t even finished reading LB4. Or Shimousa. Or Salem. Sure quite a lot of backlog I have here.

NA

I almost forgot what’s happening here but apparently Anastasia has been released. I’ve been slowly going through it.

Not pulling anything yet which means I won’t max Avicebron anytime soon. His 80% NP charge couple with non-nerfed NP sure will help farming as I have no Kaleidoscope.

I thought up next is Apocrypha except it’s first rerun of Journey to the west. I don’t have much memory of this event. I see Waver on rate up though so maybe I’ll do about 10-30 pulls on his solo banner.

Oh yeah, looking my pull log, apparently I did three pulls for class pickup campaign (caster). Still nothing.