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.

Should be fine. Install each kit in a separate channel, though. Don't mix the 8GB and 16GB sticks in the same channel.

No. That board doesn't have flashback. You'll need display out (GPU or APU) and a supported CPU installed, in order to do a BIOS update. If you don't have an older CPU you can slot in, you can contact AMD, and they'll loan you one you can use to perform the update.

Yes and no. GPUs all use PCIe at this point and PCIe is forwards and backwards compatible. As such, any modern GPU will work with any modern board. However, that particular card is PCIe 4.0x8, and the board only supports PCIe 3.0. Therefore, the card will run at PCIe 3.0x8, which *can* leave some of the card's performance on the table. It depends somewhat on the game, and it's not always a problem, but generally speaking, you should get a board that supports PCIe 4.0 on the GPU slot (B550, X570) or get a card that uses the full 16 lanes of the slot.

You shouldn't need anything special, but I would make sure you get at least a BT 5.0 adapter/card, as that's what the AirPods Max use. You can go for 5.2 to give yourself some extra features for devices that support that, but it won't help the AirPods Max. Whether to go with USB adapter or PCIe card is simply a question of whether you want to lose a USB port and have a dongle sticking out or install a card.

Capacity (1TB) depends on your needs, so we can't speak to that. I've got 3TB of game drives getting full. As far as a Samsung 980 goes, yes, it's suddicient. Games currently can't make use of more than SATA3 speeds (600 MB/s) and it really only helps with load times. While actually playing a game, you wouldn't even know the difference between that and a hard drive pushing 150 MB/s. Once DirectStorage is out in the wild and new games are actually using it, NVMe drives will start to matter, but even then, all indications are that Gen3 (PCIe 3.0) drives with maximum throughput of 3500 MB/s will be sufficient. Microsoft has already confirmed that DirectStorage will work with Gen3 drives, and the Xbox Series X|S (which uses the console equivalent of what DirectStorage will be on the PC) only has PCIe 4.0x2, which is functionally equivalent to Gen3 speeds. That said, the 980 in general is not the best drive in its class. Something like a 970 Evo Plus or WB Black SN750 are much better drives.

Prices are as low as they're going to go without pressure from new models. While 4000 series Nvidia cards are leaking, Nvidia has said nothing on timing for release, and likely are going to hold back longer than they originally planned to sell through 3000 series cards more. They took a big hit with allocation assuming a mining market that has evaporated. AMD has done little more than hint at the existence of RDNA3 cards, and likely won't release those anytime soon for similar reasons. As far as 3070 vs 3060 Ti goes, a 3070 is very likely overkill for 1080p with no plans to go higher, unless you're looking for raw FPS. You didn't specify the refresh rate of your current monitor, but pushing more FPS than your refresh is of little value, so depending on what that is, a 3070 could be a complete waste. Even the 3060 Ti is capable of 1440p gaming, for the most part, so there's overhead already even there. As far as something that will last you 2-3 years, that's just about anything. The 3 most popular cards on the Steam hardware survey are still the 1060, 1650 and 2060, all of which are at least 2-3 years old, and not high end cards in the first place. The calculation for when you need a new GPU is simply when you can't tolerate the graphical fidelity and/or FPS you can achieve in the games you care most about any more. Depending on the games, you may still be happy 5 years or more down the road. It just all depends.

My only problem is with the use of censorship. It's simply not censorship, in any form or fashion. It's a moderation choice. You can disagree with that choice. That's fine. You can argue that these types of posts should not be moderated. Fine. I disagree even there, but you're entitled to your opinion. However, calling it censorship is factually wrong, and it dilutes the gravity of actual censorship, which is real, and already far more diluted than it should be.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Censorship is about preventing information from becoming public. The problem is that people have broadened it to apply to any sort of drivel one might want to excrete from the lower hole in their head. The whole point of moderation is to keep a platform useful for its users by culling unnecessary and/or useless content. Moderation is *not* censorship. There's a whole host of unquestionably valid reasons to remove/prevent content on platforms. As such, your real problem is not with censorship, but with the definition of unnecessary and useless. You can debate that, but calling it censorship is inflammatory and completely incorrect.

If there is something wrong with the socket, it's nothing you could possibly repair anyways. It would be a manufacturing defect with the board that can only be solved via an RMA. However, since you've had this board for years now, you're long past the point where it will be accepted for an RMA. It's hard to say without knowing the full backstory, but if you're positive that it's the mobo, just replace it, and move on with your life. If nothing else that will confirm if it is in fact the board.

The problem is people don't understand censorship. Stopping your ability to complain incessantly about something a company has already publicly acknowledged is not censorship. It's simply culling noise that adds no value to the platform or anyone using it, as they explained in the post.