Eastman51

"quality" as in, has heat spreaders, lol.

The Patriot RAM is higher quality, and has a slightly higher rated speed.

The IPS has a greater chance of looking better than the TN, regardless of age. I have an IPS monitor from circa 2008 that has better factory color accuracy and better contrast than my 1 year old IPS monitor (though it does pale in comparison to my 1440p IPS monitor, which is superior to the 2008 IPS in every way). My laptop was cheap, and has a TN panel; its not even worth trying to compare it with even the meh quality 1 year old IPS panel. There are some TN panels that look decent, but even the good ones kneel before a high end IPS panel. TN usually looks washed out, they have lower color accuracy and poor contrast; but, if you care, they do tend to have lower latency.

I would guess that its coil whine (much like what you might hear from a GPU) on the motherboards CPU VRMs and from the PSU. Since the motherboard and PSU aren't "high quality" per say (not a high end third party, like Corsair PSU and MSI board for example), the VRMs (and by extension PSU) get put under heavy stress from the more powerful and power hungry Xeon that you swapped in. The i3-4170 has a TDP of 54W, which is quite low, and it is a 2c/4t CPU. The Xeon e3-1271 is an 80W TDP chip, and has 4c/8t; which means its going to draw more power. Since the motherboard and PSU are on the lower end of things, they have a hard time keeping up with the new and more powerful Xeon. It appears that they can provide enough power, but they get put under enough stress that they are coil whining while doing so. Though, I would venture to say that a mobo swap may even get the coil whine to disappear from the PSU, but I can't say for certain.

Is it also plugged into the PSU? if not, the drive won't be powered and the motherboard won't detect it, even if the drive is connected to the motherboard d

You probably want a specialized device that plugs into the power outlet, and has a output on it for the PC to plug into. A screen on the device will display the current power draw, in W, to indicate how much electricity you are using.

I have an Asus Xonar DGX, which is plenty loud for my 5.1 setup, and is great for headphones as well. This sound card is EOL, iirc, but the Xonar SE is pretty similar. The software is great, but I had to get modded drivers because the Asus ones are for the original Windows 10 build and cease to function every now and then. Considering how cheap this sound card was (~$40), I don't see the point in getting a $130 card (even if it has RGB). It might sound better, but if you're an audiophile you'd probably get an external DAC anyways (from what I've been told they are better).

850W is overkill. hmmmm The only thing I could think of is resolution, but with that CPU and GPU, max settings should be easy to reach 144fps with..... Have you tried DDU-ing the drivers and clean installing them yet?

What CPU, and what resolution?

Depends. Desktops get funky when you try to use two different GPUs like that. Laptops are a different story, but they're designed for it. You could try having both displays connected to the motherboard, and then select the render GPU in game as the RTX card. (Much like the trick of getting FreeSync on Nvidia cards using Ryzen APUs prior to official FreeSync support on Nvidia).

Why not connect both displays to the GPU?

When I test gear, I just pull out my FLAC library.

I purchased a rechargeable battery pack for my official Microsoft Xbox controller (bluetooth version, for PC), and I can get similar results to your 3rd party controller. No idea how my PS4 controller fares, but I do think its pretty bad.

Last I checked, Western Digital Blue 1TB SSDs were under $115 USD. Crucial, WD Blue, Samsung 860 EVO; they all perform basically the same, so just get whatever is cheapest.

Alright, I'll be getting RAM for the second CPU anyways, so if the workstation does ship with regular RAM I should have extra left over.

So I'm in the process of building a dual socket workstation (for server use), and the workstation/CPUs that I'm getting don't explicitly state that they do or don't support regular consumer memory or if they are ECC only. So far I have the two matching CPUs (Xeon X5660), and I have a workstation + CPU riser lined up (waiting on a couple things before I buy, but am ready to buy if the stock starts to run low on ebay). The Workstation I can get with 6 (3x2) GB or 12 (3x4) GB of RAM, but the seller does not indicated what kind of RAM it is (RAM is also going to be for the 1st CPU, idk if what memory that socket has will affect the second CPU). The workstation is a Dell Precision T7500. These workstations use a riser card for the second CPU, and the riser is being purchased separately. Each CPU should also be triple channel, iirc. On ebay, ECC DDR3 seems to be much cheaper than regular DDR3; so I would like to get ECC. The problem is that idk what RAM comes with the workstation, and whether or not my CPUs will work with regular DDR3 or ECC only. I also have not worked with dual socket systems before, so idk if I can mix RAM capacity and type across CPUs. For example: Let's say the workstation comes with 12 (3x4) GB of regular DDR3. Can I use this with my CPUs? Can I use ECC on the second CPU if the first has regular DDR3? I'm assuming that I could not add ECC to the first CPU if it has regular at the same time. Also, can the first CPU have 12GB of RAM while the second CPU has 24GB (or more)?

HWmonitor reports the same, haven't tried GPU-Z for this yet, I don't use Afterburner cause I don't OC

I was using HWinfo64 to read those temps

2080 getting killed by it but not a 1070? big thonk on that one At the same time, I'm more concerned with temps than fps

not sure

everything as high as it will go what confuses me is that my 1070 runs 65C 60fps on the same monitor with the same settings

I'd try DDU your GPU drivers and reinstall. It could also just be that DDR3 is slow and can't feed the CPU fast enough, if you can you could attempt to OC your RAM.

If you can get access to a desktop, you can take the drive out of your laptop and connect it to the desktop and try to get your data off of it. No guarantee it will work, but it may be your best bet.

maybe You can try it and see, but a lot of times some software breaks because their registry entries point to certain drives and drive letters. Usually Windows can modify the registry on the fly to deal with this, but there's no way to know until you try. Steam games don't have registry entries (iirc), all Steam needs to know is what folder contains the games and it will detect them all; you can literally just drag and drop the steam folder and add new library and Steam will see them all (assuming Steam isn't installed on the HDD).

If there's software installed to the HDD, you may have to reinstall it, since some software doesn't play nice when the drive letter changes. If all it is are Steam games and generic files, drag and drop.