Added specs: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/NNMZTH

Okay wow my NAS has been running without an I/O shield (or side panels for that matter) for like 6 months now. I should really deal with that...

Yee

Tons of people on the internet will tell you that you don't need it. It does ground the I/O though and that's quite important. I actually bought an IO shield on ebay a couple days ago too so I have to hope to god the seller sees the email I sent tonight before he ships it

Look at it this way, your stream quality with R7 will be way better than with Quick Sync

Lol not really tho, Quick Sync was the bomb when it worked

I know you really like Quick Sync but I just don't see why besides the luxury of no performance hit. I tried so many settings and it never looked as good as x264

2900 Kbps Quick Sync looked better for me than X264 BECAUSE of the performance hit of X264 while stream quality didn't really look much better. Having zero impact on your experience while the already degraded Twitch quality is slightly more degraded than it would be with X264, which also adds input lag to your game which is really noticable.

If I had endless sums of money, I'd fly to your house and play "Taps" on the triangle to honor your fallen PC. That sucks, but at least you get to try Ryzen.

Lol, would be appreciated but it's all good. I've experienced Ryzen already on my friend's PC which is mATX so the board options were limited (we settled on an Asrock B350M Pro4 which was terrible for OC but ya win some, ya learn some) and the experience is pretty solid for him, I do believe. I'm still keeping most of my old hardware - just can't use DDR3 or my Intel-only cooler.

Really hoping to find that the CPU will work in my friend's board when I test it but I'm 99% certain it's dead along with the board. At least with the i7 I could resell it.

Even with an io shield a surge can still do quiet a bit o damage. That's why I always ran my in house workstation off a ups if nothing more than to condition power, a cheap one ill admit, but still leagues better the electric in this old place. Sucks to hear you've got a bite taken out of you wallet though for something that could have been as trivial as a rear io shield :L

I have a pretty spendy surge protector that I plug everything into so I would have hoped that have solved the issue. I saw the red light trip on it, my monitors flicker and shut off, then my PC refused to boot after that. I knew the I/O shield was an issue previously because the PC had zero issues booting outside the case. To make matters worse, that I/O shield shipped a few hours ago despite my email to the seller many hours in advance...

Aw rip. Atleast you have the money to replace it right