aisle9

Bluetooth on Windows has always been hit or miss for me. That's built-in or using a PCIe card, although USB cards do tend to be shorter-ranged and less reliable in my experience. My general feeling there is that built-in and PCIe card are for permanent solutions, and USB adapters are for old mini PCs, ITX systems that have a GPU and aren't close enough to the router to plug in, and bouts of, "Oh shit, that Windows update just killed my wifi card driver again." When dealing with PCIe wifi/BT cards, it's been my experience that $$$$ != a better card. The $10-15 cards all have shortcomings, anything from short range to iffy connections to outdated tech (there are still 802.11n cards out there) to being absolute trash. I've also owned $50-70+ cards that are covered in more heatsink than a GTX 1080 and have 18 antennae, and they are absolutely no better than something like what @Skiiwee29 suggested. 100% agree with his recommendation.

Curiosity or planning?

lol this guy is gonna get banned so hard I'll feel it from here.

Too good to be true? 650GBP is about $800, which feels about right (maybe a little high?) for what you're describing, but I'm not sure what your local prices are. What's eBay's guarantee policy in the UK? In the States, if you buy something like that and it turns out to be garbage or fake, you can return it to the seller within 30 days of delivery by using "Item Not as Described" and they pay shipping, no matter what the seller's return policy is. eBay is actually the safest used merch marketplace for that very reason. Unless you're a seller, of course. Then it sucks balls when everyone who buys a $100 motherboard sees it come up for $90 on day 28, and they send it back saying it's defective.

That's Los Angeles, and it's not a meme.

eBay

I was able to get an RX 5700 XT for about that price not too long ago.

More important question: what PSU are you using? To answer your first question, extensions that plug from the end of the OEM cable into the board or component don't need to be made custom. If you're going to plug the new cable directly into the PSU and into the component, replacing the OEM cable entirely, it needs to be designed for your specific PSU, as different PSUs have different pinouts, and a 12V+ charge going to a ground wire could...well...yeah. New PSU, probably new PC, maybe even new house if you really muck it up.

Reset CMOS.

Check your BIOS. The graphics input setting may have changed to use the 5600G's iGPU. You'd just set it to use the PCIe slot for graphics. If you don't know where that setting is, make note of any changes you've made to BIOS and then reset CMOS.

The cheapest 1TB SSDs on Newegg and Amazon are $39.99 and $41.99, respectively. Sorta shady brands in Neo and Timetec, sure, but you can get stuff by Silicon Power or Patriot for that price too. The cheapest 1TB SSD I could find on AliExpress was from a brand called "Xraydisc", listed on special for $26. Good price? Yep. Search "Xraydisc SSD" on Google. You'll find a 1TB NGFF drive from Amazon with a total of 3 ratings, all one star, and every single one says the drive either failed during Windows installation or was fake. A second M.2 drive from Xraydisc listed on Amazon says more or less the same thing: the drive failed repeatedly out of the box. Sources below. Do you trust a company that's knowingly pushing fake SSDs to honor their "3-year warranty"? Nope, neither do I. And that's why I won't be buying any SSDs off of AliExpress anytime soon. It's way too easy for a company to buy a pallet of 120GB SSDs, fuck with the firmware so they say 1TB, sell them off at "bargain prices", then disappear when the warranty claims roll in. So...maybe the second-cheapest drive on AliExpress, then? It's by WALRAM, and it costs...$35. So that's a $5 savings over a real SSD from a real company selling on a platform with a real return policy. So go ahead, Google "WALRAM SSD", and you'll see a couple of YouTube videos about how awesome the drive is and where to buy it in Pakistan...and in the comments, you'll see people saying some of the same things that were being said about Xraydisc. I know there are Youtubers out there who love to brag about getting great deals on SSDs from AliExpress, and good for them. They can afford to buy 500 of them for $5 each or whatever and deal with the ones that die (then put the ones that don't into the PCs they sell...food for thought). I personally can't afford to get raped by spending $26 or $34 or whatever on an SSD, having it die in 32 days, then having to fork out an additional $40 to just buy the damn drive I should have bought in the first place. Your situation may be different, as could the situation of others reading this thread, but for my money there is just no reason to gamble on AliExpress SSDs. Most of them are fake, dying or dead, and when you get to the remotely reputable brands (KingSpec), it costs the same or more and you have to wait 3 weeks instead of 3 days. Rant over. People making poor decisions about what drives to trust their data to is a pet peeve of mine, and usually those poor decisions are guided by a desire to save a few bucks. Xraydisc reviews: https://www.amazon.com/XrayDisk-Internal-1000GB-Compatible-Desktop/product-reviews/B09JBFQ1JQ https://www.amazon.com/XrayDisk-Internal-1000GB-Compatible-Desktop/dp/B09SG2C5Z6

I hate you for destroying one of God's greatest gifts to mankind. I love that you let that little Toughbook go out with honor, class and style, reminding the world of what it and its brethren can do. Seriously, if Russia nukes us, I'm finding the nearest surplus PC shop and hiding under a stack of Toughbooks, because they will survive.

Dude, I told you that would happen. No RTX 6090 for you.

It explodes. Nah, if anything happens at all, it'll be that your Windows key is stripped from that PC and your Windows install becomes unlicensed. And tbqh, Microsoft isn't exactly batting 1.000 on actually deactivating the old computer's Windows license. And then it explodes.

PCPartPicker has a very capable set of search filters. Probably easiest to start there and ask about specific models you like than it is to throw a very broad query with tons of answers out there.

Just getting to see this one--bravo sirs and madams. I fucking LOVE tech with a weird story behind it. I'm familiar with the old Chinese chipset switch, going back to when they first started making Frankenboards out of H55 and P55 chipsets because there weren't enough working X58s left in the wild. Definitely a very cool computer, even if everything about it just screams "you're going to regret buying me".

Don't waste tons of money on Noctuas. They're nice, yes, but they're fans, and you'll get 90% of the performance and 90% of the silence out of a $30 box of 5 Arctic PWM 120mm fans off of Amazon. Put the money you'd be dropping into those (what, $30 per fan?) to get yourself a higher-tier NVIDIA card if machine learning is on the table, and a higher-wattage PSU if needed. The RMx series is a great choice.

Most budget cases will come with one fan. Some cases come with two. Some high-end cases with built-in RGB controllers might come with more. More and more cases, especially on the high end, are starting to come with none. Basically, it's always a safe bet to assume that your new case will have more fan mounts than included fans.

Thank you both, letting everything warm up is the plan

I'm in the process of moving from a warm part of the US to a much colder part of the US. I won't be able to move into my house until Saturday afternoon. In the meantime, tonight and tomorrow nights in particular, it's supposed to get cold. How call? Balls cold. 10F cold (which is negative something for all you folks in part of the world where sensible measurements are used). In my car are 3 desktops and 2 laptops. I'm concerned about the cold having some kind of ill effects, but I'm not sure if that's reasonably likely to happen. Metal chilling below freezing and gradually warming back up won't hurt it, but condensation? Would that be an issue? All 5 PCs are inside of sealed cardboard boxes. I don't have a ton of options for what to do with these. Those would be either leave them in the car or literally unpack 3 desktops and a box with two laptops into the hotel with me both nights (different hotels). If there's a real chance of a few grand worth of electronics being ruined by the cold, I'll go to that extreme, but I'd really rather not do that. Think the PCs will be fine?

Reinstall Chrome

Microsoft does not care.

Just install W11 Pro, then in the activation screen select the "I've recently changed hardware on this system" option.

That case is really only SFF in the sense that you can't fit any halfway decent cooler on your CPU (aside from liquid). Tread lightly with that 5900X. Why no M.2 drive?