Chris Pratt

Throw the case away and get one that wasn't designed by the drunken dropout from Joe Bob's School of Engineering. There's literally no intake. That poor little lonely 120mm fan is trying to suck air through glass, which isn't exactly a permeable medium.

A 3090 Ti... To play at 1080p low...

As long as they sell, they'll keep making them. And, they will sell for longer. Zen 4 is going to be an expensive platform to buy into. It requires DDR5, and that's still 2x the price of DDR4. Plus, there's still a market for people on older AM4 chipsets that will be looking for a cheap upgrade option, and Zen 3 will give them that.

Yes, it's single rank. The spec sheet lists that it's 1RX8 (single rate, 8bit)

It seems to be okayish. Multicore is a bit higher than simply removing power limits but not as high as a good OC can potentially reach. Single core seems to fair better, outpacing or match some of the highest numbers for that. I can't speak from experience on the 12700K, as I don't own one, but my 5900X fairs better on multicore (though, with four extra threads) but not nearly as good on single core. That lines up about right with E cores making up some of the 12700K multicore performance while having stronger single core performance overall than the 5900X.

PCIe 5.0 is mostly about providing more/faster I/O for things like USB4. Even though there's PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives coming, the Gen4 drives are already faster than most any application can utilize, especially for normal consumers. Currently, even SATA3 is more than sufficient for any gaming purpose, and even with DirectStorage, you don't need more than PCIe 3.0. Graphics cards can barely oversaturate PCIe 3.0x16, as well, and it will be a long, long while before they're hitting the ceiling of PCIe 4.0. PCIe 5.0 is virtually a complete waste for gaming purposes alone.

This brings up some good points. A lot of gamers are still using SATA SSDs or even HDDs for game drives. I don't know if something like storage medium is captured on things like the Steam hardware survey, but I'd imagine sone developers would want to wait for some critical mass of NVMe game drive install base before devoting resources too heavily towards DirectStorage. You look at the current gen consoles space, and aside from a handful of pure "next gen" titles, most new games have not fully taken advantage of asset streaming there, either, choosing to maintain backwards compatibility with Xbox One/PS4. It's also worth mentioning that a ton of gamers are still using older GPUs that wouldn't be able to benefit greatly from DirectStorage anyways, mostly due to relatively small amounts of VRAM. There's always a cost ROI with these types of things, and unless the developer is focused on and has the freedom and resources to realize some new game vision that's not possible without DirectStorage, there's going to be a lot of inertia towards just doing things in the same old way and not having to worry about cutting out part of your potential customers.

As far as I'm aware, there are no games. Last I heard, the first expected to use it are coming in 2023. You have to realize game development takes years, and something like DirectStorage is fundamental enough that a game needs to be designed around it. If a developer started right when DirectStorage SDK was finally released (March 22, 2022), even 2023 would be an extremely optimistic time to start seeing games using it.

To be fair, it was still a good showing for bit retention. It wasn't an even distribution. Some of the ones further down had really bad retention. It's just that bit retention was relatively good for most, and the LTT screwdriver just wasn't quite as good as some. Still not bad, and it's not like it's going to be falling out or anything as a normal thing.

I'd be very wary of that PSU. It may be fine, but it's not a well known brand. Far too many people make the mistake of throwing all their budget into the CPU and GPU and just get whatever the cheapest PSU they can find is. In reality, the PSU is really the single most important part of your system. Literally every other component relies on clean, stable power, and a bad PSU can actually negatively impact the performance of things like your CPU and GPU, not allowing you to get your full money's worth out of them. The PSU is also the component most likely to catastrophically fail, resulting in fire or other damage to your components. That's not exactly a normal occurrence, obviously, but it does happen, and is more likely to happen the cheaper the PSU is/less reputable the brand is. Since you're saying CHF is roughly equivalent to USD, 20 or so extra CHF spent on a PSU to get something like the beQuiet or Corsair models that showed up in the list there would be easily worth it.

The 11600K just has Intel UHD graphics, not even Xe, so performance in general will be very weak. You might be able to do some very light gaming on it or maybe something a little heavier with low quality and/or low resolution, but for the most part, gaming isn't going to be a real option. That said, the GT 1030 is not a very capable GPU either, especially with only 2GB of VRAM available to it. It will be marginally better than the iGPU on the Intel chip, but you're really talking about maybe a game being playable at 720p medium vs low or not at all. In general, neither is going to provide a good gaming experience. The 11600K is a better CPU overall and has more performance than the 5500, so for everything else you do, that's the better option. I'd just not even worry about gaming as an option and go with the 11600K. You can add a dGPU in later if you decide you really want to do some gaming.

Probably, but it's not the lack of RAM really that you're feeling. The CPU is doing work and needs to be essentially fed in order to keep doing that work. The RAM is what is feeding it, so ultimately it can only work as fast as it's given stuff to work on. If your RAM is exhausted, the system must start to page data in and out of RAM using the vastly slower storage of your machine. Even the fastest Gen4 NVMe SSD is order of magnitudes slower than RAM, so this has the net effect of slowing down that feeding process of the CPU. That then obviously affects the ability of the CPU to work as quickly as it can, resulting in things like stutter. It's the CPU that's causing the stutter, and you'll see that regardless of how much RAM you have if it's just not fast enough in general to keep up with the workloads being handed to it. Exhausting your RAM just makes it worse.

First, never trust anything you see on YouTube. Even in the best case scenario, temperature won't just drop immediately. There's a lot of science involved here, but there's essentially a gradient and heat moves from areas of high temperature to areas of lower temperature. That process takes time, dictated by the steepness of the gradient. A heat source sitting out in the middle of the Sahara desert will take much longer to cool than one placed in a deep freeze. Whatever temperature is set as some maximum will be the point where the CPU starts to dial back on its power budget/do less work in order to produce less heat. It's still not producing a zero amount of heat (unless it completely shuts down), just less. That means there's still heat being introduced into the system that needs to be removed in some way. If not, temperatures will continue to rise unabated. Assuming there's sufficient cooling for the heat being produced, or more appropriately there's enough airflow to move the heat away from the system, it will eventually start to cool. It's not magic. Throttling the CPU just gives whatever cooling systems are in place a better chance at actually being able to remove the amount of heat being generated in a timely enough manner to prevent buildup and allow temperatures to eventually decrease. If the cooling system is insufficient, our the environment doesn't allow sufficient heat transfer, then temperatures will not drop.

You can't just put a hard limit on temperature. The CPU produces heat and if that heat is not properly dissipated it will continue to rise. I'm not sure exactly what you set, but the best the CPU can do is throttle once you hit that temperature (i.e. cut the clockspeed). That means it will produce less heat (at severe cost to performance), but it doesn't guarantee it can actually keep the temperature there. Again, if the heat is not being properly removed from the system, it will still continue to rise, even when throttling.

RAM capacity doesn't matter unless you don't have enough and start paging to the filesystem. You seem to be getting close to that if you're using 10GB of your 12GB already, but assuming you're not paging yet, then adding more RAM will have not have an impact on your performance. You should monitor your RAM usage, especially while gaming to verify that you're not exceeding your capacity and not paging. If you aren't, then you're safe to hold out, as adding more will do nothing currently. Now, that doesn't mean you won't start exceeding it next week, since you're getting close, though. So, you can either continue to monitor occasionally or just go ahead and add more to have some safety overhead. Just know that it's likely not going to make a difference in your performance.