I would suspect the quieter at idle is because of helium.

I have both drives and can confirm the old bruisers are pretty loud.

Drives are going to be a little louder doing a random workload than when idle or doing sequential work

Interesting … Eyeball linger time?

Gotta turn the labhouse into a labhome

I wonder if the big copper heatsinks are worth more than the CPUs

The Intel probably has lower power consumption at idle. But if that isn’t a big concern for you then I would go with the ryzen because more cores

Also, there may be big motherboard differences that might sway you to one or the other. Like better expansion capability.

Cascade is for if you have a special service provision from AT&t. Possibly static IPs, possibly something else.

IP pass through is what you use for a typical consumer connection where you just want to forward all of the ports directly to your desired router. And I use that and it works fine

I think I remember having to reboot both the AT&t box in my router a couple of times to make the IP pass through really stick. Also, I possibly had to manually assign the Mac address rather than use some sort of auto detections scheme

I would check the logs on the ASUS router to see if any traffic is coming to it.