T3500

You can get USB 3.0 PCIe add-in cards

This will tell you https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Do you know what the manufacturer of the VRAM chips is on your GPU? The Micron ones don't OC as far as the Samsung ones AFAIK; it was pushing the VRAM further that leads to crashes on mine. I can go at least +144 on core though. My max temp has never gone above 51 Celsius due to the Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo II that I've got on it so it can maintain full speed constantly (currently 2100 MHz)

Could you consider aftermarket cooling? I have an Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo II on my 1060 and the body of the cooler is considerably offset compared to the stock cooler giving more clearance above the PCIe tab

I'm not a programmer but my brother says: askToPlayAgain is never declared as a variable is it? " AskToPlayAgain(); bPlayAgain = AskToPlayAgain(); " just needs to be " bPlayAgain = AskToPlayAgain(); "

Yes quite easily. Here's an article that I based my setup on https://redacted.tv/2017/01/04/how-to-build-a-100-gaming-pc-guide-benchmarks/ Some of the Xeons like the W3680 and W3690 have unlocked multipliers allowing you to squeeze more performance out of them (overclocking using ThrottleStop - the only way of doing so if you go down the used Dell workstation route for example), and they will trade blows with much more modern stuff. Those two CPUs are getting on for 8-9 years old now!

I don't think you can turn it off, it'll be part of how the game is made. Only yesterday evening was I researching this myself, as I get the same effect seen in the Witcher 2 where sunlight or a shadow falls on another object

Does the grain you see look like the pattern that I have attached? In which case it is likely caused by dithering, a technique used to simulate transparency in games that use deferred shading