QuantumAbacus77

I thought there was talk about the new Ryzen processors being delayed for quite a bit due to the coronavirus. Between the two currently available, if you plan to do literally anything other than gaming, the Ryzen 9 3900X is the obvious choice. At the same price it blows the i9 9900K out of the water in all categories except for single core processor speed, which even there the Ryzen holds its own quite impressively.

Ditch the PSU. You can easily get a great quality PSU with equivalent wattage for half that price. Then you can put that saved money towards a good after market CPU cooler, since you generally don't want to use the cooler that comes with the processor, especially if you plan to overclock.

Running memtest86? No, not at all. It runs outside of the OS environment, so it wont touch any files. Just install it onto a usb or CD and follow the website's instructions on how to boot it onto the bad computer. It'll give the RAM a comprehensive memory test and make sure it returns the expected results. The test can take a while to complete and you might want to let it cycle a couple of times, but if it finds even one error, then you likely have faulty ram. When I ran the test it only found 3 errors, but they were enough to make my computer practically unusable. I sent the bad ram stick back to gskill, who replaced it at no cost, even though I'd had the stick for several years by that point, so kudos to them. I don't think you can do that in the case of your mom's laptop though. I don't know how old that laptop, is maybe you could find some compatible ram for dirt cheap to replace what's in there.

Get one of the 3rd gen Ryzens though.

I'd go with one of the Ryzens. MUCH better suited for gaming and far more affordable. They're the dominant gaming processors right now.

You're going to have to replace that motherboard for sure. You won't find any new processors compatible with it. This means you'll probably have to replace the ram as well, as current motherboards have ddr4 slots. But with your budget you should easily be able to build a decent gaming rig. For only $800 USD I'm making my pc vr ready, replacing everything except for the case, SSD, and PSU.

Could be a another faulty component? I had a pc a while ago that would also freeze and BSOD randomly. I ran memtest86 on it and found out one of the ram sticks was bad.

Wow! Wasn't expecting to get replies so quickly. Re-installation it is! I also linked my windows 10 OS to my microsoft account (thank you Slottr) so I can easily reactivate it in the new hardware.

Hey y'all! New user here. I apologize in advance if this question has been asked before. I have a budget gaming pc with an old ASUS motherboard (about 7 years). Right now what's sitting in it is an AMD-8350 and GTX 1060. I was planning to upgrade to a Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 2070 super, till I saw that the Ryzen needs a board with an AM4 socket. So now I'm looking at replacing almost every part of my computer. I've replaced my processor and GPU before, and windows obviously seems to handle it no problem. But now I'm essentially putting the hard drive into an entirely new setup. I've heard people say that windows 10 is very good at recognizing and accepting new hardware, but that even it apparently has its limits. So my question is can I get away with simply sticking my SSD into the new motherboard, or should I just wipe the drive and reinstall windows? I do know that if I decide on the former option I'll still have to uninstall all of my current drivers. My other question is will I need a license key when I reinstall it? I started with windows 7 and upgraded to 10, and I lost that windows 7 key years ago. I have my windows 10 OS backed up onto a usb, so I'm hoping I can use that to just reinstall windows 10 onto the new setup without needing an activation key. I'm sticking with an ASUS and AMD combo, which I hope will make the transition a little smoother, but I'm still not sure. I'd prefer not to reinstall windows, but it's not the end of the world if I have to. What do you guys think? Am I safe to just swap over, or should I bite the bullet and reinstall?