Fasauceome

correct. The PCIe bandwidth doesn't need to stay high for idle operation so you will drop PCIe revisions for efficiency.

A 3060 would work just fine, though usually AMD offers better price to performance. An RX 6600 XT would also be worth considering.

This is a good PC. But, if you want to improve the gaming experience, a new graphics card would be a solid choice. With a Ryzen 5 3600, most anything would accompany it nicely, so base your upgrade more on budget most of all. Of course if you upgrade super far, considering buying a new power supply and monitor would also be worthwhile.

It's what I would recommend if you are able to get it running again

With a power supply replacement not helping, I would try a BIOS update on the motherboard. Something is amiss, and if the BIOS update fails, I'd say you're due for a motherboard RMA with the manufacturer

This sounds like it is probably a motherboard or power supply issue. Are you able to borrow a power supply from another PC to test with?

it's cheap because it's an auction. 6 days from now it will be a few hundred more expensive.

Most of these cards shipped new with both a regular and low profile bracket. When shopping on eBay, make sure to select one with a low profile bracket included, such as the one @8tgreferenced in the included pics

Seconded, Quadro graphics cards with a load of mini DP ports are cheap and easy to come by, and so are mini DP to HDMI adapters.

Unless you're doing it for fun, don't worry too much about oc on this setup

I am not sure what you mean by that. Large quotes are collapsed by default and can be expanded to read the whole thing. If you're talking about full quotes vs partial quotes, partial quotes only quote what you highlighted by dragging your mouse. If you're talking about images, you just double click the image to alter the size.

if you hit up cooler master support they might be able to help

the MX150 refers to multiple GPUs actually, there's no one set spec (which is frustrating). In a laptop, the biggest factor for GPU performance when comparing two similar products is the power allotted to the GPU. If the MX150 that you have on hand has a similar CUDA core count to the 1050, and has a higher power budget, I am sure it's clocking much higher for that reason and performing better.

If it's more a matter of space there are a few things you could do. Does apple music still provide access if the MacBook is closed? Maybe yon can close the laptop and have it right up against your PC

My dad went through the struggles of finding a better way to do this and he settled on... running apple music from an old macbook. Seems this actually is the best way apparently.

The raw performance is adequate, but the drivers are questionable.

You might be able to use a computer at your local library, or ask a friend if they can lend you a laptop for this purpose, or see if a local PC shop would allow you to make a boot USB for really cheap or free

Yes. But first I just remembered, you should try to repair any damaged system files. Open CMD as administrator, and type "sfc -scannow". If that repairs some files, restart the PC and try to update again. If that doesn't work: 1) download windows 10 iso https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO 2) run this program. If it gives you another error while trying to update, grab a USB drive 3) make your USB drive a windows install tool using this ISO 4) turn off the PC and unplug every drive that's not the main boot drive (this can come in handy trust me) 5) turn on the PC with the USB plugged in, and go to BIOS to select the USB as your boot option 6) once you get to the install page, you should have the option to format the main drive and install fresh.

AMD Ryzen processors use something called Infinity Fabric to enable the CPU cores to talk to each other. Infinity Fabric is tied to the memory bandwidth and latency, so two sticks of ram will make a pretty huge difference.

What version of windows 10 are you running? Is it very up-to-date or rather old? If it's an older version I know a tool that can be used to download incremental ISO versions. If it's a recent version, you're better off downloading a fresh ISO off Microsoft's website and just formatting the boot drive, and installing fresh that way

MCE is mostly a gimmick. On consumer boards, it's more useful to force a small overclock on something like an i5-7400 (back when that was relevant) but in an i9, you're really not getting much difference vs a plain old overclock.

Did you update the BIOS on the biostar A320 for 2000 series CPUs? If not, it's not surprising that it doesn't work

Make sure to quote us so we can see your responses. If you have the Ryzen 5 2600 and the B350A4 on hand already, you might as well put the 2600 in the board and just see if it works

The FRU and model number are different, B350A4-LM is definitely the model. Given than it's a B350 motherboard from an OEM I would guess it only supports 1000 series CPUs, you could hit up Lenovo customer support and ask what product this motherboard comes from to check firmware and compatibility