Crunchy Dragon

I use a red dot, no magnifier. I don't need magnification inside my home. Astigmatism on my RDS is fine(Bushnell TRS-25), but it is still there if I don't have my glasses on, so I've considered switching to a prism for that reason. My astigmatism isn't bad enough so I can still shoot well without my glasses(it also helps that I'm farsighted and don't struggle to see things up close), but if having a prism and no astigmatism would reduce the amount of effort my brain puts into putting shots on target, I think that's a very worthwhile investment. For the mythical "combat" or "SHTF" rifle, I really think it would depend on what I'm doing with the gun and what the gun's job is. Magnification would become a requirement, but I'm not sure if I would take an LPVO, 1x with a magnifier, or just a normal magnified optic like an Acog or equivalent. I'm not gonna rock a 4-14x scope on a rifle that I'm running around the streets with, but if I was farther out in the wilderness and needed to see farther or positively ID friendlies/threats, I'd take the high zoom scope all day. LPVO probably makes the most sense for an urban "combat" rifle where you're going indoors, outdoors, clearing buildings, and everything else you do in your prepper SHTF fantasies, just because it allows you to see things closer and farther and you don't necessarily have to be stuck with magnification when you'd rather not have it. I don't have any experience with LPVOs though, but I have used red dots with magnifiers and liked the experience. The one issue I have with that is it's a little difficult to fit ironsights on a rail if you also have a flashlight, RDS or holo, and magnifier.

Is it configured as a boot option in your BIOS, or are you able to boot to it from the Boot Menu? If Windows is installed, you should be able to boot to it.

Hit Windows + R, type in "Diskmgmt.msc" and hit Enter. This will open the Disk Management utility, from which you can format your new SSD and initialize it. Every new drive has to be formatted before it can be used.

I don't remember it happening on any consumer CPUs from that era. The biggest issue with the 7700K was needing a new chipset and motherboard, and not being backwards compatible with Skylake. Skyake-X was the key offender because they didn't solder the IHS, and the TIM between the IHS and CPU die was not great. Delidding was basically mandatory if you wanted to do any serious overclocking on X299.

-Moved to Audio-

8700K wasn't a champion, but it was certainly capable of overclocking without delidding. Skylake-X was the largest offender in recent years that I can recall. If it's stable, there shouldn't be any problems. What CPU cooler do you have?

This is partially why U.2 exists. All the benefits of NVMe without needing to worry about finding a good way to cram a bunch of M.2 drives into a system: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/nvme As far as consumer hardware goes, you'd have to buy an older workstation platform such as X99 or X299(or their server equivalents) to have enough PCIe lanes, then a case that has enough drive bays, and some adapters to give you enough U.2 ports. A workstation motherboard that supports PCIe bifurcation(a lot of them do, especially on X299/C422) would make this job a lot easier. The other benefit of LGA 2011v3(X99/C612) server hardware in particular is that it's pretty dirt cheap on the used market these days and quad channel DDR4 is still no slouch. The main drawback is not all of the boards are ATX compatible and some of the worst offenders(HP and Dell come to mind pretty quickly) are massively proprietary. I was just looking at picking up a Xeon E5-2690v4 for my X99 system, it's a 14c/28t CPU featuring 40 PCIe lanes and a respectable 135W TDP. Those currently run about $40 per CPU on Ebay, and are scalable up to 2 sockets. That's really the main issue with these kind of specialty ventures. Consumer hardware typically doesn't have the features or support for it to work, so you end up on used server or workstation hardware anyway. A used Intel workstation build is still cheaper than a new(or possibly even used) Threadripper build, with very comparable features. Power draw is also usually lighter on some of the Xeons that give you a pile of PCIe lanes compared to Threadripper. For comparison's sake, the aforementioned Xeon E5 2690v4 is 14 cores, 40 PCIe lanes, 135W TDP for $40 on Ebay. A Threadripper 1920x is 12 cores, 60 PCIe lanes, 180W TDP, and is still over $100 on Ebay for the CPU alone. Now on the topic of raw CPU performance, any Threadripper CPU will run circles around anything on LGA 2011, but if you just care about PCIe lanes, a used Xeon setup is a very economical solution.

Some of us prefer not to deal with it altogether This is already kind of a thing, just not openly broadcasted all over the forum, and not limited to well-known members(although there was a bit of correlation in the past). Users have asked us for permission to run various giveaways through threads or status updates, and usually it's granted. As mentioned above, Folding and BOINC are all user-organized and ran, and usually have some form of prize incentive for the top competitors.

"you wouldn't download a car"

I will usually recommend the option with the larger storage. I'm not currently aware that there's enough of a performance difference with M2 vs M1, but the less you have to have an external drive connected, the longer your battery will last. Additionally, it's always nicer to just have files you need to access saved locally and not have to dig up your external drive.

M.2 will always be faster, but for the end user it's not usually a big enough difference. I have games on an NVMe SSD and on SATA SSDs, I've never really noticed a difference in load times, even with the same games.

I've not played around with those, but I do have a pair of Athlon MPs -- same chip as an Athlon XP that supports multiple sockets. Fun stuff.

Yup.

VRAM does tend to be the limiting factor, this is true. It should be perfectly adequate for your use cases. Especially coming from laptops, almost any desktop computer is going to be a major performance upgrade.

I would have either gone with a used 30-series card or stepped up to a 4070 or 4070Ti personally, but whatever works for ya.

They get powwer via the Molex connector that all your system fans are connected to. It looks like this:

I don't think I've ever accidentally yoinked SATA power, those connectors are pretty robust. Images can be posted here. Another thing people often do is upload them all to an Imgur album and link the album here. As far as I'm aware there aren't any hard rules against it, but we do prefer communication is kept on this platform.

Is your cloned C: drive the primary partition on Disk 0? I wouldn't expect Windows to care about something like that, but it's also exactly the type of thing Windows would be picky about.

Those videos are probably available for the LTX Digital Pass subscribers.

You might be able to gain a little headway if you slap some fans in the bottom and top to help move air through the case more efficiently, but I honestly wouldn't expect particularly great numbers. 13900K tends to run on the hotter side, so you're already more or less the best you could get, give or take a couple degrees. Better airflow might bring your temperatures down a handful of degrees(less than 5), but unless you were able to get a larger radiator(and by extension, a larger case), you're about as good as you can be.

I would probably guess the stereo can't read the format of the USB drive, or it just can't read the drive at all. I do find it curious that it would say "reading" rather than throwing an error of some kind. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, your proposed solutions #1 and #3 are the same solution -- an issue of formatting.

It's difficult to offer recommendations without knowing more. What CPU is it? What cooler do you currently have? What case? What's your case fan setup? That said, 80 is on the higher end of normal but still well within acceptable temperatures.