Zando_

No idea. 12th, 13th, and 14th gen seem to all have the same 20 CPU PCIe 5.0/4.0 lanes + 8 DMI 4.0 lanes downlink to the chipset. So I don't see how they could change something in the BIOS that would cause issues, or why. Lanes on a highway. Add more of em and you get more bandwidth (more cars across the same distance in the same amount of time). Your CPU has 20 lanes, 16 go to your CPU PCIe slots (one x16, or both at x8 if you install something in both slots), 4 go to the CPU M.2 slot. Your chipset M.2 slots, PCIe slots, and most of the board I/O share the 8 DMI lanes. So same as a highway, they get congested when you have more "cars" (things using PCIe lanes) than you have actual lanes. Each of your SSDs is using 4 lanes, so if they're running at 4.0 speeds then 2 of them fill that highway and everything else backs up behind them. Intel/AMD assume most people won't be loading a bunch of high-speed drives so they can get away with this. But I think it's rather stupid given the popularity/low cost of very fast NVMe drives, and the fact that Intel/AMD market their mainstream CPUs to "prosumers", who will be doing exactly this workload regularly. HEDT is unfortunately pretty dead due to the prohibitive cost of current kit + a lot of it being focused on workstation use not people who just need a beefier alternative to mainstream. For reference, my i9 7980XE has 44 CPU PCIe lanes, so I can run an x16 GPU and 4 M.2 drives, all at full bandwidth, through the CPU itself. That's 32 lanes, leaving me with 12 more, though I believe on this platform 4 are stolen by the chipset. Leaving me with 8 spare. And modern HEDT has even more PCIe lanes so it gets rather silly (the current Intel stuff has 64 or 112 PCIe lanes depending on chip). Back on topic, from your motherboard manual, M.2_1 is the CPU M.2 slot. M.2_2, M.2_3, and M.2_4 all run through the Z690 chipset. If there's 2 drive you consistently do large file transfers between, I would put one in the CPU slot, and the other in one of the chipset ones. Realistically other stuff is going through your chipset, so if you're running a transfer between two drives that are both in chipset slots, that's likely why it's choking.

Yep. Mainstream just does not have enough PCIe lanes. Sounds like you're simply bouncing off the bandwidth limits of the lanes you have available. You have an x8 DMI 4.0 uplink from the chipset to the CPU. That's equivalent bandwidth to x8 PCIe 4.0 IIRC, and all drives in chipset slots + lots of your other I/O (USBs, NIC, etc) also go through this. Only takes 2 fast PCIe 4.0 drives running full bore to hit that limit or get very close to it. Thus why it's ok with 2 of them, but once you add a 3rd drive of any kind and load them all, it goes over the bandwidth limit and chokes.

Oh. That's a 360Hz e-sports monitor, not an old 144Hz monitor like you mentioned in the OP. Hardcore CS:GO/similar games players do not care about colors, only refresh rate and response time/input lag. It's likely a cheaper way to get a very low response time monitor vs going OLED.

Sure you're not just seeing new-old-stock TN panels at inflated prices?

Getting the dust out of your PC makes your heatsinks work properly, so it's likely just that. You're also using HWMonitor which can often be inaccurate, so it could be that derping out too. HWiNFO64 is the much better hardware monitoring utility.

990 in the CPU lanes slot, 980 in the chipset lanes. So 990 in M.2_1 and the 980 in M.2_3. M.2_2 is PCIe 4.0 through the CPU as well, but the motherboard manual is not clear on how this is accomplished and whether it'll cause the GPU slot to drop to x8. The chipset has an x8 DMI 4.0 (equivalent bandwidth to PCIe 4.0 IIRC) uplink to the CPU so with OP's setup there shouldn't be any noticeable speed drop with the 980 in chipset lanes anyways.

It's another 240mm of rad space between the two, so it does make a difference. I just think dual 240s should already be plenty, so no need to go double overkill if you have to sacrifice too much. If a case checks all your boxes and clears dual 360s, then that's icing on the cake. The dense rad with the 15mm fans is probably what's killing you on noise. They aren't Noc's quietest fans, especially when spun up to middling rpm, which they'd need to be to get much air through the rad. A low fpi rad should actually be better, as you want to be running low rpm fans to keep noise down, which obviously drops static pressure, making a high fpi rad less effective. HardwareLabs still claims pretty beefy capacities for their GTS rads: I'm not seeking super silence and I got them because they were affordable, so I blast air through them anyways. Don't monitor coolant temps currently so I can't really offer much testing on how they perform with low rpm fans to see if it's close to the claimed numbers. But they are 16fpi and "optimized for sub-800 rpm fans", so they should do well.

What board, what CPU, what's the setting in the BIOS called, what was it set to originally, and what did you change it to? Change any other settings or just that one?

Do not waste space on the 990 Pro installing your OS. The big gains on NVMe drives are for large file transfers, the OS loads a ton of tiny files. The OS doesn't boot any faster off the latest NVMe drives than it does off a decent SATA SSD. Heck on my stuff with a bunch of PCIe lanes/devices (older HEDT), it's actually slower to boot off NVMe (as that uses PCIe) than a SATA SSD. I only have my OS on an NVMe drive for convenience sake.

^^^ For most home NAS/VM use a simple modern 4c/8t chip is plenty, NAS duties are single-threaded and many VMs can even share a single core, depending on the hypervisor you use and what they're doing. Or obviously you can run containers in the host OS or a VM and they'll share whatever resources are available. If you do think you'll use all those threads, it is a solid machine, just keep in mind that it will pull a good chunk of power, and servers can be incredibly loud. Usually you can spin the fans down a lot though, without running into thermal issues.

I play Helldivers 2 at 4K with a 2060 Super, I have everything on med/low and resolution scaling down a couple notches, it still looks great and runs very well. If it's a laptop 3060 then I'm not sure how it compares to the desktop 2060 Super.

I tried Fortnite once 5+ years ago, I think it's changed too much for me to have any useful info on it. Some friends play it together and they seem to have fun, so it's worth a shot. They have a no-build mode too, so you don't have to compete with an 8-year old building the Taj Mahal right in front of you the moment you fire in their direction. Overwatch ehh... the whole Overwatch 2 thing seems horrible from what I've seen. The game was bleeding players before, and 2 added more problems AFAIK so I don't think it's doing so hot. A couple coworkers play Warzone 2.0 (its F2P) and they keep trying to get me into it, but battle royales aren't really my thing so I just mucked around in normal PvP because I got the Modern Warfare 2019 and 2022 games for free (one with a code from a friend who got it with their GPU IIRC, the other I got when I bought my ARC card). Poking through my steam library, if you're at all interested in RPG/MMO games, Star Wars: The Old Republic is F2P. I believe you need to pay to really enjoy the MMO bit, but I've always played it as a singleplayer RPG, the stories are quite good (It's by Bioware, before their goofy stuff with Andromeda/Anthem). I believe I did pay for the premium sub for a bit because I wanted some of the perks, but it's not required to enjoy the story bits, it was just a nice-to-have. The Imperial Agent storyline is especially lauded as a really good one. I had fun with the Agent, my regular good-guy Jedi, and playing a morally grey-ish Sith (not downright "kill people for the fun of it" evil but still a Sith). Poked around as a Republic trooper too. Apparently they just moved to a new developer though: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775530/star-wars-the-old-republic-broadsword-bioware. I haven't been on in a while so I don't know if anything changed vs when Bioware was running it. Last I was on they had just updated a bunch of the class system to make it easier to pick and choose what you wanted for your character IIRC. I don't really play many other F2P games, I mostly like open/semi-open world RPG or sandbox games, those are usually too expensive to develop to hand 'em out for free. I get lots of them on sale for very cheap, as I noted above I'm late to the party so they're "old" games now and thus get discounted deeply. I did play Genshin Impact for a bit, it's a pretty nice game but it very, very much wants to get money out of you as it is a gacha game (basically play the lottery for new characters, you can get some for free but most are locked behind the gacha system). If you have a bunch of storage space and want to sink a bit of time into learning how to get mods to work together properly, there's always the ole Bethesda games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 especially) that you can get on sale for extremely cheap, and fix them up into... really anything you want at this point. Some madmen even got cars working in Fallout New Vegas.

Never switched. Games were originally made for mass appeal. We got more niche games thanks to that casual consumer success making games a viable industry. They do. I assume you're not hanging out with kids all day, they very much do still play barbie and legos (I have a bunch of younger siblings and a niece and nephew). Windows 10 will run on the same hardware as Windows 7, and it'll bring DX12 compatibility with it which depending on implementation, may help your hardware run games better. It can be run unlicensed if they killed the W7 keys working for W10 thing. Yep. I get the MTX for live-service/online titles that have constant server/content dev costs. But most companies get far too greedy with MTX. The MSRP increase for new AAA titles is silly too, they complain about development costs, but they're the ones making the budget for games so massive to begin with. And the ones firing loads of devs every few years (think of the added cost of bringing on new people and training them to do the thing you already had someone for, just because you wanted this quarterly report to look good). Yeah. CDPR CEO admitted the execs made the choice to push it out when they knew it was not ready. I assume you mean EA's Battlefront reboots, the 2nd one did get the MTX toned down after launch and a lot of work was done, so it's a very good game now, but as you said that's after many folks moved on. Starfield seems to be more a case of over-ambition rather than corporate greed. They really cooked themselves trying to go for the massive planet count, instead of a nice well-sized hand-crafted world which is what they excel at. I'm waiting for mod support so they can fix the issues I have with the game . Elden Ring. I adore it, and I don't like overly hard games. It gives you a ton of tools to scale difficulty for yourself (summons, OP weapons, leveling up a bunch, summoning another player and laying on the ground while they 1v1 the boss for you) and a horse to just run away and come back later if something's too tough. Helldivers 2. Phenomenal 3rd person co-op PvE shooter. The developers seem to have their heads screwed on right. There is MTX but it's fair (stuff doesn't go away to try and scare you into buying quick), and you can find the premium currency in missions so if you wanted to you can just play the game enough to afford all the stuff you want. Tis how I have the armor bits I liked, haven't spent a dime on the game above the $40 entry price (also very nice vs the new $70 standard). For racing, if you haven't tried them already, any of the Codemasters Rally games. I would recommend a wheel though, I don't have one so I didn't get as much fun out of it as I would have. They are very, very well crafted games in terms of vehicle handling, and they'll run (or at least Dirty Rally did, Dirt 4 should as well) on a Dell business laptop with a dual-core low power i5, so their "Codemasters" name seems well earned. Spintires (the original one) if you want to poke about driving heavy trucks through mud. I tried Snowrunner on gamepass and its fun too so worth a look at. Apparently the mud physics and truck details are worse in it, but I didn't play long enough to notice stuff like that. Red Dead Redemption 2 if you haven't played it already. Very good cowboy game, the best parts are actually the character interactions, not the shooty shooty. Online is barely even on life support, but I hop on every now and then just to poke around. Ubisoft games . They're bloated and can be eh quality, but you can get them on sale pretty often for like $5 or less each. I've enjoyed Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint (after turning the silly rpg stuff off in Breakpoint). And I had fun in the newer AC games (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla). They're less assassins creed, more adventures in X or Y historical period, but I like 'em. Haven't finished Origins but it seems the best crafted so far, Odyssey gets a little too big, and Valhalla is comically large. I got tired of playing it and still had multiple DLCs left barely touched (a roguelike mode, 2 new country dlcs, one where you play some entire storyline as Odin, etc). The best AC game I've played so far is Unity though, I actually got that free when the Notre Dame burned down (AFAIK the most realistic model of the Notre Dame is the one in AC Unity, so Ubi gave it out for free in memory of it). I've had fun in the Far Cry games too, though 3 was my favorite of those. The Metro series if you haven't played that already. I like post-apoc stuff a lot and it's done very well. I don't have a ton of really new games to suggest other than Helldivers as I did above. I don't play many indie titles, and I got into PC gaming in 2017 or so, so I've mostly gone back and played older AAA titles.

Nvidia won't let you pull unsafe wattage/voltage on modern cards. So unless you've done some shenanigans to get around that, yes it's safe.

A lot of really big titles are live-service now, so they continually update the game instead of releasing a new title in the series. If you want more traditional AAA games, FromSoftware still makes those. Their current titles are Elden Ring and Armored Core 6, Elden Ring is getting its first DLC this June. I haven't gotten into AC yet so I don't know too much about that. Also lots of AAA titles are absolutely massive now, taking years upon years to create, and given current corporate/management behavior they often flop on release, or just don't live up to their massive expectations (Starfield did this, it's not bad it's just... not great either, and it was expected to be so). So you've likely ignored the ones with a bad reputation, thus it feels like there's less games coming out.

I don't have any experience with SFF custom loop builds, so I can only recommend Optimum Tech on YT if you want to see more of that kind of build, or @Damascushere, he's an SFF fiend and has done quite a few loops as well. I have run dual 360s in a full size case, and now I run a 360 + thick 280 (about the same performance as 2 360s) in a full-tower, Corsair 750D. I cool an i9 7980XE and 2060 Super with that. The 2060 S is only ~200W, but going off other people's numbers (my kill-a-watt broke) I believe my CPU should be somewhere around 400-500W all by itself at current settings. Based off wattage draw dual 360s is probably overkill for your setup, so I wouldn't stress about getting a case that fits dual 360s if it's going to be an overly expensive or difficult build (unless you relish that). No matter what size you end up with, you should be able to get rads that are optimized for low-rpm - usually sub-800 rpm - fans (my HardwareLabs GTS rads are, though I whack air through them with a bunch of Noctua F12s regardless), and there's a decent selection of fans that are practically inaudible at those speeds.

What CPU? Are you folding on it? Unless you want the heat output to heat your room or something (I have done this), then folding on the CPU is pointless. A 240 rad should be fine for a GPU and a CPU that's mostly at idle (F@H will use one CPU core/thread per GPU so it won't quite be idle). What case do you have currently, and what budget + aesthetic were you looking for in the new one?

Motherboard to case, within reasonable tolerances as @Hinjima noted, as some socket/CPU packages are taller or shorter than others by a few millimeters (and this will raise and lower the cooler). They say it has clearance for a 165mm tower, this is with the motherboard installed on the included standoffs (important note as some standoffs are taller than others by another couple millimeters). The actual distance between the side panel and motherboard tray will be greater.

H9 Flow: DRP4: It should clear. 165mm of clearance, the DRP4 is 160mm off the socket, leaves 5mm of leeway.

In this comparison the 120s are better. Noctua's NF-A12x25s are their best fan, they have not been able to beat it thus why there is no 140mm variant. The A14 is an older design. Both are fine (I use A14s) but the NF-A12x25 is a better balance of airflow/pressure vs noise.

They're all bent one way sorta like little springs, if any point a different direction then they're bent. It will be blatantly obvious if they are. Very slight bends usually don't matter as the CPU presses down on the pins and will force slightly tweaked ones to align, and they have decently large pads to contact with so they don't need to be as precise as you'd think.

Paper towel. Toilet paper will fall apart as soon as it gets wet.

Yep, it'll just take slightly longer to dry than 91%. I've used both for years without issue, for cleaning CPUs and GPUs.

Wipe it off with a clean paper towel and ispropyl alcohol, make sure it's fully dry before reinstalling (should dry in a matter of seconds but if you use lower concentration isopropyl alcohol it can take longer) and it'll be fine. Heck, unless you've got a visible fingerprint on it just a quick wipe with a dry paper towel should be good enough.

.... Installing Linux would do the same thing reinstalling Windows would in regards to returns. Neither. Get an 8GB+ USB drive, download the Media Creation Tool from Microsoft, create a Windows 11 install USB on said drive. Boot from that, delete your hard drive partitions, then just click next (windows will automatically make the partitions it actually needs) and run through the install. Doing a reinstall from inside Windows itself will just re-use the same Windows image that's causing the problems in the first place. There is an option to download a new copy instead of reinstalling from local media, but I don't know if this grabs a clean ISO from Microsoft or the bloatware one from the OEM's servers. I always play it safe and simple, just use a USB drive.