Zando_

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 Games were originally made for mass appeal.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.

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.

This isn't actually a problem, but in any case, Hardware Monitor is not reliable. Use HWinfo64. 

I'm rocking a 7800X3D, though I'm certainly not folding with it. my GPU temperature goal is 50C
 
I really like SFF builds! I will upload some pictures of my build tomorrow!
 

 
I was thinking to either go with a CM NR200P with dual 240, something like this
or a jonsbo i100 with dual 360.
 
 

its calculating in the motherboard as a standard.
You have 5.6mm clearance to the front panel with the cooler attached to the motherboard.
Usually they underestimate for safety margins so you should end up with more than that.
You are good to go 🙂

Yes.
 
I've done that before with Intel LGA chips. Any fingerprints or wipe marks on the pads will make them catch the light differently, so they'll look slightly different from the cleanest pads. They still work fine.

Unless your CPU is being gimped by poor VRM (and you don't mention your CPU at all), buying a better motherboard will not by itself make any difference in performance.

ok they're alright not bent.

thanks 

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. 

Worth asking, have you clean installed Windows already? I do this on every machine that comes through work and we have way, way less issues. Whatever OEMs do to their copies of Windows just makes the OS horrible to use. Especially HP, though ASUS is pretty bloated too. 

oh ok, thank you so much for all your help ^.^ i really mean it ^.^ i do have the MSI MPG Velox 100R case already so ill take a look at it and measure things to see and make sure the arctic liquid freezer III 420 would fit in the case and be able to be mounted 😄

That was extremely hard to read with no punctuation. 
 
No, eGPU's rarely if ever make sense. Just save up for a desktop.

The iPhone 15 GPU has higher peak performance (tflop ratings, though they are different architectures so that's worth considering too) than a PS4. It just doesn't have active cooling so it can't sustain that for long, though even with the drop from thermal throttling it's likely closer than you'd think. Also, optimization work is an important part of porting, and I'd assume that's what this is, not emulation as that would be horrifically inefficient. 
Yeah, the games listed will run on Steam Deck at appropriate settings, and we've gotten a port of The Witcher 3 on the Switch, it didn't look great but it ran playably. 
If they do their optimization work properly, and assuming they do target 60fps at all, and not 30 as many games do, then it should run at or near 60 just fine. 

Source on this? Unless they do a poor job of optimizing they should be able to run playably on a current iPhone. We've got similar games on Steam Deck and even Nintendo Switch. Though I would recommend just getting a PC for 'em to begin with, even when games run well on mobile I find that phones are a worse experience due to small screens and not having great input options. 
 
iPhones are currently king for long-term support, if that's a major concern then pick the iPhone. Though unless your Z Fold is out of date or you're out of storage, you could just keep using that and get a new phone when it no longer works properly. I've decided I hate paying for new phones so I'm just going to use my 128GB 13 Pro Max until it's dead or no longer supported. 

I don't see the point of spending $600+ on new parts to fill out a build around some old parts you got for free.
 
Seeing what else you can find in the secondhand market, sure. But $200 for a 1070? I don't care if it's "refurbished," it isn't worth more than a hundred bucks at the very most based on performance. 

This seems pretty doable and should work just fine. Just install something like Proxmox and fireup some vms for the different use cases.
 
1TB drives are often a pretty bad value now, I'd get 2x 4TB drives for more space, less power, and empty bays if you want to expand later on. 
 
Don't use WD RED drives in a NAS, there SMR and not suited for nas and ZFS use, use red plus or ironwolf drives.
 
 

As for how to attach, I'd probably go with an HBA and SATA breakout cables.

It's quite small and the Define 7 Mini has clearance for a proper tower cooler.  The NH-L12S is no slouch (I have one), but it does not have the surface area to compete with a 120 or 140mm dual-tower style cooler (like the Noctua NH-D15, which I also have). If you don't want a Noctua specifically, you can get a Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 which performs the same as the NH-D15 for usually $35.

hmm
 
almost nothing wrong really, there's a few things you should consider though,
 
how is Gigabyte B650M GAMING X AX for your use cases? I will include it in my list and photo of it's back below it.
the only immidiate downside to Gigabyte's board is it only has 2 M.2 slots, whereas Asrock Pro RS Wifi has 3, do check out the motherboard, if it has all the things you need, if you consider Gigabyte to reduce the price a little.
 
The ram is decent, but I'd consider paying slightly more for lower latency one, since it's just nice to have fast and low latency RAM,
 
the PSU is quite good quality,
 
the case looks pretty decent, it's pretty pricey so that's expected, not sure how soundproof it is, but looking at the filters it could be decent while maintaining some airflow, got some fans too,
 
as for a CPU cooler, you can go for a high quality and performance one, and if it's noise wasn't great, you'd simply run it's fan at slow RPM
 
PCPartPicker Part List
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor  (€197.00 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B650M GAMING X AX Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard  (€165.90 @ Alza)
Memory: TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory  (€116.39 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: Fractal Design Define 7 Mini MicroATX Mini Tower Case  (€109.90 @ Galaxus)
Power Supply: SeaSonic G12 GC 550 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply  (€68.90 @ Alza)
Total: €658.09
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-02-23 21:27 CET+0100
 
Here's the backside of Gigabyte Gaming x Ax

 
 
So your build is great, there's nothing wrong with any part Do consider a 6000Mhz 30CL RAM If you feel confident with Asrock Pro RX Wifi, stick with it, it's a good motherboard  
yeah but 7600 can boost over 5Ghz and it uses the Wraith Stealth cooler, which I think it doesn't use copper core unless for AM5 it does?
 
though I do agree, that trying it out to see if it's too noisy or not can save money and time getting the CPU cooler, because the stock is much easier to install

oh ok thanks ^.^ and mounting on the top is also just the best for the lifespan of the radiator as well anyways ^.^

And be available for an in-person hazing ritual. 

Not a dumb question. Usually if it can fit 3 140s, it can fit a 420 rad. But sometimes the 420 rads are not 420, they can be longer by a bit, sometimes they are too thick  etc. Just comes down to the radiator. It should honestly fit, but they may just say 360 fits because they can gurantee all of them will fit.

Yeah makes sense. Would running +200 on the core be fine and just leaving the memory clocks stock. The +200 gives a real nice fps boost.

I agree with the above.  If that doesn't fix your problem, I would also suggest trying the GPU in the other PCIe slot.  It might be worth planning to change out your MOBO at some point, even if you don't get the artifacts again.  It sounds like you have a lot of other MOBO related issues.