Kirah

Right, getting the AM5 chipset directly from AMD seems to have fixed it *knock on all the wood* it also seems like it has improved my frame timings somewhat as games feel smoother my refresh rate is sadly still limited to 120, but it might just be due to a bad DP cable as it has a few years on its neck at this point at least I can sleep soundly at night knowing that my brand-new GPU is not busted out of the box and have to deal with RMA and all that jazz

I don't really use ray tracing in general ( hence why I went with team red this time around ) the Nvidia software is completely gone since i did a fresh windows install when i built the pc

Yeah i never had any problems when i was using w7 ultimate i decided to install windows 8.1 cause i was bored and needed something to kill some time and i had a license laying around.
It seems to be working on the the 2.0 port for now at least.

Ah fair enough just as long as i can hear the small details such as footsteps and where they are coming from and such it will be fine.
And i can prob mess around a bit with razer surround if i have too

I see i'm not the only one i have the exact same counter top and legs for my computer desk.
Cause i couldn't find a desk in the size i needed for a reasonable price.
Oh and word of advice if you need to carry it up some stairs.
Get some one to help you carry it cause its quite heavy.

It depends on what kinds of games you play for example if you play a lot of mmo's you will see quite the difference in performance.
i know most Valve Games are CPU bound so is Civ 5 im pretty sure BFBC2 is cpu bound as well.
So you might want to look up the games you play and figure out if they are more CPU Bound then GPU bound.