KhakiHat

Dealing with the bios is incredibly easy, as long as you aren't trying to remove or update firmware within the bios itself. Usually even a quick YouTube search will give you a well rounded enough answer to work your way into figuring it out. An example being "MSI XMP bios settings" or ASUS XMP bios settings" and chances are you'll get a whole list of videos to skim over.

No problem, happy building

Alright, nothing stopping me from upgrading now 🙂 Can't wait to finally activate XMP with proper Motherboard - RAM combo.
Thank you!

What a shitty extortion attempt. Release LHR bypass for everyone, force nvidia's hand.

Something must be behind this bullshit. I mean, how long has the LHR been around? And why now? "We decided to help the gaming and mining community" What the fuck are they even talking about?? Yeah no, probably extremely desperate for attention indeed because this is entirely nonsense.

I will stay in intel, but I will change from a cheap motherboard from a pre built PC to a high quality board, perhaps ASUS or MSI. My current BIOS are these old classic blue and gray only bios and I can't even find XMP from intel in it, so I am very sceptical when it comes to my motherboards bios...

What do you mean by adapter? Do you mean the 3 pin / 4 pin PWM connector to the motherboard? And huge as in tall? Do you want a flat cooler or just not a large one in general no matter if tall but slim or flat but thick?

What cpu do you have?
Do you intend on oc (if you have a k cpu or bclk oc board)?
Need the cooler to be very silent?

Ok so the only ones I found that have a compatible mounting kit included are:
Arctic Freezer i35 (has 4 different versions with RGB and non RGB and so on)
Noctua NH-L9i-17xx (basically a very flat cooler, you need to check if it fits onto your motherboard and doesn't hit the RAM when mounted)
 

Are you staying in the ecosystem? Like Intel to Intel or AMD to AMD? If so, you're probably fine outside of any motherboard BIOS changes you may have made(those would need to be changed again on the new motherboard).
 
Personally, I've never had any issues with just keeping the same OS install on whatever medium I have it installed on.
 
You may have to select which drive to boot from, but most systems auto-detect an OS install regardless of the OS.

It is a DDR5 board.
 

Some motherboards have a DDR4 version and a DDR5 version. As you have probably discovered, the STRIX z690-e is not one of those, it only has a DDR5 version No motherboard supports both on the same board.

DDR4 RAM is not compatible with DDR5 slots. I read somewhere there will be adapters though...

remove the hard drive/ssd, that should always land you in bios.

You could try to build out a system in a virtual machine, but fair point. It would probably take longer to get going, but at this rate of not finding anything useful...

Ubuntu will see there's already a bootloader on the other drive and put its loader there too (even if you tell it not to in the installer, long-standing bug), so only one drive wil be bootable but should allow booting the OS on the 2nd drive.
 
If you want each drive to have its own loader you must only have that one drive physically installed at time of install. So Install one drive, install one OS, remove it, install the other drive and OS, then put both back in. 
 

Have you installed the drivers for it?

Ok looking at the list is very overwhelming. Single rack, double rack?
what would you recommend as a HIGH quality PSU?  I would like to return this “game max” (obviously) and get a superior PSU. 
as mentioned I have a o11 dynamic XL which is a “full size” mid tower atx case. No I am not using the hot swappable 3.5” caddy’s, I actually removed them completely to accommodate Better wire management and put my psu on the top since the psu cables for my other build (thermaltake t71) were a STRETCH reaching the 8 pin cpu headers.
 
money is not a question, reliability is much more important. I mean prior to plugging in the usb flash, as mentioned used a day before, no issues. I had my iphone usb-c to thunderbolt (whatever they call it) plugged in. Phone wasn’t so that’s irrelevant I guess. Unplugged that, put in drive, gone
so crap PSU was the problem as I thought. Why would it have run POST hours later, when I left it exactly as it was?  Possible the capacitors/chokes/VRMs/etc “cleared”?  I still find it weird…
 
Corsair I saw on the list… recommendations?
thanks again

The first mention of GameMax is in tier C(cheap/low-end systems)
Your gm1050 is in tier D(very cheap/igpu systems) for the safety of your hardware, I would recommend changing it.
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1116640-psu-tier-list-rev-148/

I won in my first try, so...

You could try Daemon Tools.

News to me.  First time I've ever heard that speed matters more than capacity.  I mean, if you never even need 16GB, ok maybe.  2400 to 3200 is not as drastic as some make it out to be, imho.
 
Are you using 1/3 or 2/4 channels?

Could have moved air bubbles into the pump area, maneuver your PC again and try to move them into a trapped position in the radiator.

It really depends on how much you are willing to spend companies like Origin PC and others are good options. I highly recommend watching the secret shopper series on LTT to see what your experience with a pre-built company will be like. Hope this helps

To be fair HDR is garbage on both. I'd say LG has a lot more experience with HDR displays because they have some of the best HDR TVs out there, but idk how this translates to their monitor division. My 27GN950-B had no issues with HDR whatsoever.
 
Out of these two the Gigabyte is better, and that while being cheaper.