Rhianwen

Pi-Top's aren't great, they're really meant for kids learning to program and not to be used for any kind of serious work. I would pickup a Thinkpad with a 6th gen i5 and upgrade the ram to 16gb and that should be good enough for what you need. I used a 5th gen i3 laptop for quite a while and while it could slowdown on occasion, it was quite usable for Java programming in classes and Word 365

I'd look at it from a different direction. What are the driving factors to needing more hardware performance?
 
We have increasing resolutions, and framerates to a lesser degree. This scales well with GPU power, so it is easy to look at more GPU to reach your performance target. I'd consider a 2080Ti/3070 to be 4k60 high class for modern games. 4k displays are ever more common so more people might want more higher end GPU.
 
CPU demands? Much less important, but not unimportant. Again this is more of an enough vs not enough thing. If you have a quad core, sure, it'll probably function, but you may not be getting the most out of your GPU. I think we're at the stage where if you want anything beyond entry level, you should be looking at a modern 6 core CPU, with 8 being the performance sweet spot for now. More than that, outside niche scenarios, doesn't really buy you more for gaming. Ram is similar to CPU. You need enough capacity, but more doesn't really help. Speed helps with performance as a smaller factor.
 
We should also look at the consoles, since they will influence the target level for gaming. We now have 8 decent cores in current gen along with 16GB of (shared) ram. It will be unlikely for game devs to target far above that for the life of the current generation, so that will likely be plenty for several years. Of course, there might be settings provided in some games that go beyond what current hardware allows, but that's more of a stretch goal than a requirement for today.
 
The first thing NOT to do is take the userbenchmark numbers literally. Any measure that tries to simplify a very complex measure into a single number will have problems.
 
Now for much older or less demanding games, their figure of 35% difference between the 8700k and 2400 might not be far off. Try running Cyberpunk 2077 on it. Chances are, it'll be a bad experience on the 2400 but fine on the 8700k. Who cares if it is 35% at that point? It is not very useful when people go CPU 1 is X% faster than CPU 2. You need to look at what it does for your gaming. If both CPUs are good enough, it doesn't matter much the performance difference between them. If one drops below a performance acceptability threshold, that's when you should care.
 
IMO I think modern 6 core CPUs (Haswell-E, Coffee Lake, Zen or newer) will be good enough for years to come. Quad core I feel is close to dropping off performance acceptability if you want to play the latest demanding games at a great experience level.

Regularly? SecondLife, circa 2003 technically.
I didnt play back then, but its the oldest game i still regularly do play.

 
Beyond that, Halo 1 from time to time, Unreal Tournament 99, and every so often i bust out the old laptops to play DOOM 1 and 2

Stop using windows 7. 
It's liability, it's out of support, it's less stable than 10. You have 3 os to choose from, win8/.1, win10, and win11. 
 
Everything to do with windows 7 officially no longer exists, the only way to get things is from "pirates" that are hosting it now.

I followed Skiiwee's advice just now, I removed the fan and listened closely, it gurgled for a split second then nothing happened, no vibrations nor sounds. I can safely say the pump is indeed dead.
 
I almost completely neglected something so simple as the liquid cooling being a factor, thank you so much everyone!

if it shoots up instantly like that.. sounds like an issue with the water pump likely being dead. Verify you can feel vibrations and hear water moving through the pump. 

Get a good air cooler now and you will get many thanks from your sister for fixing the PC!

Hmm, I felt the hoses last night and they were still pretty darn cold, so that may be it... This is legit my very first time dealing with liquid cooling, so bear with me here lol
 
If the hoses and radiator were still very cool, while the block is blazing hot, that would be viable confirmation right?

Smh clearly it's a GTX 1660 Ti with more VRAM

Some are.

OMG yes, Fallout 1 and 2 are easy on the eyes and full of things to do, and since they are isometric games older than the hills, they should run on just about anything.

So like that Trabant that Doug DeMuro Reviewed sometime back...
 
 
Nah I just like my pcs like they're something bought off a shelf or found in the offices of an office complex.