Gurky

An m/2 slot? No, that is not going to power SATA drives.
 
How many drives are you using? What is the power supply in the mini pc? If it's the stock brick, then the system takes up roughly half of that under load leaving you about 30w. BUT there is no convinient way to get power from the brick or PC to the drives. You are really only left with a seperate PSU for the drives. It doesn't have to be an atx power supply, you can use a power brick, but you will need to get "creative" with adapters. (barrel jack to molex)

One way that I have seen a lot is using a standard ATX PSU with enough SATA power connectors and just wiring it up to start upon flipping the switch on the back.

Personally I'm ignoring that.
 
If the temps are fine under load then ignore it.

Personally: I wouldn't bother switching from 1151v2 to AM4, but it does allow you to keep your current memory.
 
Going to AM5 will give you future CPU upgrades and a 7600 is a nice pairing with your graphics card, but you will require new memory.
 
If I could afford not to, I wouldn't buy any CPU that isn't a 'proper' Raptor Lake, so I'd rule out the 13400/13400F and unless confirmed otherwise: all the non-K 14th gen CPUs.
 
If I was going AM4, I don't think it makes sense unless it is cheap and the 5900/5950 are really workstation CPUs, not gaming CPUs.
 
The 5800X3D is great if you play games that really love the cache, but at this point: I'd rather have the 7600 or 7600X and be on a new platform.
 
I'd remove the 5500, it isn't worth it, since the performance is a big chunk down on the CPUs with the full cache and PCI-E 4.0.
 
If you want to save some money on the AMD AM5 build, you can get cheaper boards (either A620, or a different B650) and drop the cooler if you buy the 7600 non-X, since it includes one in the box.

Best price with decent performance = 5600 non X
Best value if you want 8 cores = 5700X
Best gaming performance (reusing your DDR4 RAM) = 5800X3D, but expensive
Best value if upgrading to DDR5 = 7600
Best gaming performance bar none = 7800X3D 
 
 

Are you budget limited?
If not, consider getting "the right one" at once instead of being able to upgrade later. I got a 5600x (which is great for my use case) but now I can't really see myself paying full price for an upgrade to a 5800x3d for a 20% ish performance increase in games. 
Should probably just have paid the price premium in the first place. 

The best value would be the 5600, but the best gaming performance would be on the 5800x3d

How on earth the're gonna make more money if they backport functions to older devices?

I'd get a 3600 and a b450 
PCPartPicker Part List
Motherboard: MSI B450M PRO-VDH MAX Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£68.47 @ Amazon UK) 
Custom: R5 3600 with cooler (£70.00)
Total: £138.47
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-10-04 14:08 BST+0100

Well, the i9 9900K would be the only worthwhile upgrade, and even it is outdated.
 
The i7 8700K would be a better choice than the 9700K. 
The 9700K is the 8600K with 2 additional cores and it doesn't have hyperthreading just like the i5. 8 cores 8 threads.
The 8700K is the 8600K with Hyperthreading meaning it has 6 cores 12 threads and it's comparable to a Ryzen 5 3600.
The i9 9900K has 8 cores 16 threads and it's comparable to a Ryzen 7 3700X, just slightly weaker than a Ryzen 5700X.
 
But the i9 9900K holds a high price.
 
You are way better off switching the whole platform. The CPU and the motherboard, and eventually the RAM too.
For example, i5 13600K with a B760 board with ddr4 support.
 
TL;DR - no cheap upgrade to an 8600K.

Nope do not. It's a pure 8 core and that is literally MINIMUM at best for games these days.
 
The only "good" options are a I7 8700(k) or 9900(k) and both are way expensive.
 
Basically to the point that a b550 + 5600 is about the same cost 😛

Absolutely this platform has 2 cpu's "worth" their while which ain a whole lot.

Still more than my 125W 1660 Super! Obviously, underload mind that. 
 
EDIT some quick google math £1.28 a week based on 4 hours a day at full load. 

Ok so the games you mentoined are all cpu bound like a lot. A pure 6 core cant deliver a stutter free experience.
 
So id say a 6700xt + cpu upgrade. Its also cheaper to move platform than to stay on intel since the only worthwile cpu's are a i7 8700(k) or 9900(k) and those are EXPENSIVE and are beaten by yesterdays/todays budget ones

Also, if you game a lot, the 7000-series are much more power efficient so if you pair it with a more efficient power supply your electricity bill should be less painful.

I mean, you're paying 50% more for the 7800xt over the 6700xt.  it's not a question of if the 7800xt is better, but is it worth it.
 
You're already on 1440p, though I am curious why with a 8600K + 1660.  That's nowhere near 1440p gear.   Both the 6700xt and 7800xt work on 1440p fine.  
 
It performs better, but not 50% of course.  So you are the one that can identify your wallet, income, expenses, etc.
 
You went from a 350 budget to damn near 600.  Why even mention budget at all?  
 
If you have the money, I would get the 7800xt + PSU. 
 
 
 
 
 

7800XT would be best or if you could try to aim to get a 6800XT for £350-£400 used. Though the extra £80 isn't too far off for more features and peace of mind. 7800XT would be my pick as well.

It's difficult for me to follow your British reasoning lol 😛 but I agree with the conclusion, 7800XT is the best value 🙂 

There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.

To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.

Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
 
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...
 
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.
 
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip.  I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.
 
Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).
 
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient. 
 
We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
 
Thanks for reading this.

Legend I will order an SSD now then and now "Bulky spare" will become  my good one! 

Look at the 'Raw Read Error Rate' and 'Seek Error Rate' values, It's pretty bad.
Your drive has issues reading from the platter.
 
Your drive is on it's way out.

GSmartControl is very good at displaying what these values mean,
I wasn't able to test it on SEAGATE drives though (I don't have any),
But it reports correct values for my TOSHIBA and WesternDigital drives + Additional useful data for troubleshooting.

Unfortunately a lot of SMART values differ on what they actually mean based on the vendor so you can only trust their own software to give a full picture.

I recommend GSmartControl for reading SMART data,
I often find that Crystal Disk Info doesn't display the correct values.

Have you checked your calender recently? 
I'd say come back 2 weeks before black Friday mate.