RAS_3885

It's a little more involved than replacing paste on a CPU, but not terribly difficult. It will vary from card to card depending on cooler design, but there are plenty of guides/walkthroughs online to make it easy to figure out. Most paste will be similar performance as long as it's not bottom-of-the-barrel cheap. Name brand stuff like Artic or Noctua will perform close enough to not worry about it.

Something like HWInfo64 will give you temps for a whole slew of different temp sensors. Nothing you've noted so far is high enough to warrant a shutdown unless your PSU is overheating. If you look at the Windows event logs does it give you an indication of why it rebooted?

Network lag or low FPS? How are your temps?

Normal component temps are going to feel REALLY hot to the touch. Are you monitoring the actual temps via something like HWInfo64? Fundamentally the airflow looks fine, other than you're feeding your GPU with hot air from the AIO.

If you're hitting your FPS target with a graphical quality you're happy with then it doesn't make sense to upgrade. if you're not, then upgrade.

What's the specific PSU model? Sounds like either a temp issue or a PSU on the fritz.

You may be limited by the case, but a quick search showed folks fitting a 240 mm AIO with the radiator mounted up front. Unclear if they had to physically modify the case or not, but I didn't look too far into it. Alternative would be a decent tower air cooler, but I suspect clearance between the side panel and motherboard may be restrictive size-wise. You could also do something like a low-profile non-stock air cooler, such as the Noctua NH-L12S type design (just example). Any of those options will need a backplate installed.

I don't game on my work laptop (obviously) or my phone, but I use the internal speakers all the time for Teams calls (work laptop) or random Youtube videos on my phone. Being forced to connect headphones or earbuds all the time would be an annoyance.

As long as it's a standard form factor drive and both laptops support that form factor the yes, it will be physically compatible.

If you NEED a new card now and are willing/able to pay current prices, then go ahead and upgrade. If you WANT a new card, then only you can decide if your willing to pay current prices or wait and gamble on speculation. If you don't need a new card and are okay with current performance, then wait. No more complicated than that. Until the next gen product is released EVERYTHING is speculation (performance, price of old gen, availability, etc.). There's also always something new on the horizon...

If you want way more detail this site is a great read. https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html

Yes, it will be fine. Just give it an extra minute to evaporate completely.

The second slot will only run at 3.0 speeds, but any drive will work since 4.0 is backward compatible. You’d just be wasting money on the faster drive since you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the faster speed. But it would work just fine.

6+2 PCIe power cables standard fare for GPUs with 8 pin power connectors. No issues there. I would, however, be replacing the PSU regardless. An old PSU that's been through two power surges is not something I'd put any sort of trust in.

If you're happy with the performance you're getting now it makes little sense to upgrade. But, if you really want a new GPU then only you can decide that.

At normal viewing distances for a computer monitor the pixel density of 1080p on a 32 inch monitor is pretty low, so the image just doesn't look very crisp. For me, 1080p is good up to about 24 inch screens. Above that I'd switch to 1440p. 32/34+ inch 16:9 I'd go 4k.

Could be from the start/stop scheme or could just be the fan dying. You'll never be able to quantify a shortened life span, if any, from starting and stopping a CPU fan (or any other PC fan for that matter). THEORETICALLY there should be a little more wear when it first spins up, but again, you'll never be able to say it caused early failure or not. Regardless, it's a silly control strategy for a CPU fan. When I had a motherboard that support SpeedFan I spent entirely too much time trying to come up with clever strategies to stop fans (case, CPU, GPU) until certain temp thresholds. Setting large hysteresis values to prevent the fan cycling on/off all the time as CPU temps fluctuated normally. All in the name of keeping it as quiet as possible. Fun to mess around with, but totally unnecessary and performed worse. In the end, just setting constant minimum RPM that's acceptable for noise and letting it linearly ramp up was almost always better.

Task Manger if fine for most basic stuff, just not Ryzen CPU frequency. Everything else, such as CPU utilization, GPU usage, RAM, disk activity... all fine to reference Task Manager if you want. Quick spikes on cores is completely normal and will happen with something as small as a background process in the OS. Nothing to worry about at all.

Are you running a Ryzen processor? For whatever reason frequency reporting is off in most places. If you are, Ryzen Master will report the correct one. I've found it most closely matches HWInfo64's "Effective Clock" sensor reading. For reference, cores WILL jump up in frequency all the time as the OS does stuff in the background or you open apps. That's normal, it's just most software I've found reports the down-clocking incorrectly. As in, not really at all.

Task Manager and ResMon are just bad at reporting frequency. Mine does the same, but it's running at idle clock currently.

Yeah, it will work just fine. The first one runs on PCIe 3.0/4.0 x4 connected to the CPU while the second slot runs PCIe 3.0 x4 through the chipset. Both will run simultaneously at full bandwidth.

What motherboard?

If you have a bunch of desktop icons you can also F11 full screen a dead pixel test website (the black screen portion) and hide the taskbar. Then just ALT-TAB to the game.

Depending on how many times you ran the benchmark I think you're on to something here. I just ran a benchmark on my NVMe drive (3270 MB/s read for reference) and it added around 100 GB to the total written amount.

Try checking with another program, such as CrystalDiskInfo, to make sure it isn't Samsung Magician reporting bogus numbers. Does Task Manager or Resource Monitor show constant disk usage?