Crunchy Dragon

that is a good thing. you want your gpu to be as high as possibe. if your ram at that high you might want to close some other tabs or windows or consider upgrading

That means the system is well balanced (gpu fully used = no CPU bottleneck). For that game it means you could also use a stronger GPU properly.

It's a bit on the low side, but not by a whole lot. It can probably be explained by most people who run a 4790K run them at 4.5GHz at least, so that skews the test results up a bit, or it could just be that your Windows install is pretty dirty and that's what's reducing your benchmark scores. 
 
It could be that one or two of your cores are stuck at 100%, but since you're only looking at overall usage the actual usage remains low. With CPUs, overall usage is kinda meaningless in games since a lot of games aren't really optimized to take advantage of more than 2-3 threads, you really want to just pay attention to the per core usage statistics instead.

Meanwhile I still haven't been able to take the Cat to the range. Very sad 😞
 
Is quitting my job so I have time to go shooting a viable option...?

At best youll be destroyed by aliex shitty handling of shipping time and cost in duty fees and shipping as well, and at worst youll get utterly taken for a ride by the seller. Dont shop for deals on aliexpress if youre in NA and EU, shop for actually good shops and parts youd have hard time to find anyway in places like ebay.

While there are some deals to be had there, it’s a dice roll on many fronts. Hell, even if you do manage to luck out with a good seller and product, you still have virtually no semblance of a warranty due to the shipping costs involved.

Try reaching out to Antec customer support to see if they have replacement parts available. https://www.antec.com/support

I understand this is a vent that will probably get deleted, but I'm bored. 
I see you've never bought quality tools before. They aren't cheap. Especially if made in lower volumes like LTTs are. 
Places like amazon can offer 1-day shipping due to having thousands of absolutely massive warehouses across the country with the most commonly bought products stocked there. LTT does not have that kind of infrastructure in place, they are likely working with FedEx/UPS/etc, at work we have contracts with FedEx to ship stuff out via them. They typically pick up at the end of the day for us, LTT takes their product in to be shipped last I heard, so 1-day shipping likely isn't a practical ask for how their setup is. 
 
Basically, make at least some attempt to understand how things work before assuming malice. 

The problem is your 2x16GB kit will be running in dual channel, with the 3rd stick running single channel. Combine that with possibly different IC chips, memory size, memory speed and timings; yes it's going to cause crashing/freezing/BSOD. 

Definitely, some DIMMs don't get along with each other. On most systems you won't want to run 3 sticks of RAM anyways. There are some HEDT CPUs that support triple channel, but not common mainstream ones. 
As I understand it, it will run the first 2 sticks in dual channel, and the 3rd in single, so once you get to that stick there'll be a slowdown. The instability is likely just different ICs and such as @CommanderAlexpointed out. 

Even your ISP knows when you turn a VPN on. Networking isn't my strongest suit in IT, but it doesn't seem like a long shot to me that one can find a way to block VPN use at the network level.
 
 

The 13500 is already out, it's just that stock is pretty poor.
 
HardwareUnboxed did a video recently on the 13400. It offers comparable performance to a 12600K, but at a higher price. You don't even get UHD 770 graphics with the 13400. Just go with the 12600K, even if you are on a locked motherboard. 
 
If you really need the extra 4 E-cores as well as UHD 770 graphics, then you should wait, or save up for the 13600K.

My memory's a bit rusty, but I want to say Blender works for that and is free.

Agreed - "Velma" is a total porta-potty fire of a movie.
The critics all agree on that and ticket sales do too.
That's what happens when you try to "Re-invent" something already established and loved for what it is instead of just leaving it alone.

Let's be fair here, they are crap. IMDB, which is usually quiet favorable to even sub-par garbage, rates Velma at 1.4 (but She Hulk is at 5.2...go figure)
But back on off-topic, have you seen the sci-fi series "Into The Night"?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10919486/
 
1st season was great, the 2nd season a LOT less so, but still worth watching.

Yeah, that does get a bit much when it's in almost every episode. Same with the cutaways he always uses like Tyrion throwing up. It's fine if you just watch one episode every now and then but if you watch a couple of episodes back to back or watch regularly it gets a little annoying.
 
He does have a point though. So many movies and TV shows are just gender/race/sexuality swapped from existing IP and it's lazy and it really hurts the characters and writing. When they release new properties with characters that are well written he's normally pretty positive of it (before going on a rant about all the other shows that did it poorly that should learn from it). As long as they keep releasing stuff like SheHulk and Velma there's going to be critics like Critical Drinker criticising it.
 
The stuff that the Critical Drinker recommends I generally like. Looking at that recommended playlist everything on there that I've seen I really liked* (except maybe Cobra Kai. I originally liked it but it got super repetitive and way too much teen drama after the first few seasons).
There's a fair bit of stuff that he has praised that isn't on there. Not sure if it wasn't enough for the "recommends" tag or if it's just missing. Shows like Reacher and The Terminal List were two shows that I watched and enjoyed from his recommendation that aren't on that list.

Quite a few for sure, but well-made movies don't do it nearly as much. Lord of The Rings, Predator 1, Alien, original Indiana Jones trilogy, original Star Wars trilogy, Top Gun(1 and 2), Back To The Future 1, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc etc.
 
Good movies are just...better. lol
I think it's more garbage because of the creative decisions made by the people writing and producing said content. There are some things made recently(and not so recently) that are pretty good, and he acknowledges them. The Drinker Recommends is a good series if you want to hear absolutely everything he praises enough to recommend it.
 
Andor he seemed to like for sure, along with M3GAN. Could also include House of The Dragon, The Terminal List, and Prey. All Quiet on The Western Front is on The Drinker Recommends.
 
There is definitely an argument that "he's too negative", but I'm not willing to put that all on him. If there are things that make movies bad, they should be talked about and hopefully fixed. If there are things that make movies good, they should be praised. Is the amount of negative things he says about modern movies and TV shows because he is negative himself, or because the things that make movies/TV shows bad so prevalent in our current society?
 
Those are just my two cents though. People seem to either like or dislike The Drinker. Personally, I've found myself thinking a good amount of what he says even before I hear him say it. /shrug

Glass Onion is good. First movie of the series was perhpas better, but marginally. Enjoyed both, don't watch movies often anymore.

No, only one actor is the main character in both. There's only 2 movies in the series at this point.
"There's a Knives Out 3 in the Works" google tells...

I will absolutely grant you he's an atavistic throwback to the 80s and rather chauvinistic, but more often than not he's right about the casting choices. Take a look, for example, at the latest Predator flick. Set within the time of the Native Peoples of the US. That's cool, something different...
Now make the lead a female...
 
Okay, different, but okay...
Make her a warrior...
 
Ya blew it Hollywood. Look up the history of the People you have as your central theme. Women didn't go on hunts and raids, oh and they lived in the plains...no mountains around.
 
...details matter.

I more or less agree with The Critical Drinker with regards to Indy 5.
 
 

Maybe these lower core count Xeon W's won't be that costly, I just can't bring myself to be hopeful of that lol. I'm still running my X79 system and I'm still salty about what happened to HEDT over the years and it's death.

Who knows...knowing how Intel encounters issues and delays their product lines multiple times. 😂
 
I did create a Tech News article in case anyone is interested. It just seems like more and more leaks are coming out pointing to a launch, so I felt it was worthy as Tech News. 
 
 

Welcome to modern hollywood, it pisses me off too.

I remember when WD made 10 and 15,000 RPM hard drives.
 
Be interesting to see a combo of the two.