STRMfrmXMN

Hard drives have moving parts so, by design, they don't last as long. However, if you're the type to do sustained writes on a drive day in, day out, it'll probably be no more reliable for you to get a cheap DRAMless SSD over a hard drive. The cheapest DRAM cache SSD is the Crucial MX500, and can be had pretty cheap for 1 TB being about $85.

It would be best to use the new cables that come with your PSU. Not all pinouts are identical on all ATX PSUs. Would be nice if they were, but you don't want to fry anything finding out they don't work interchangably.

A lot of new RTX cards are triggering OCP in decent PSUs (I believe the transient spikes in power demands from the GPU are what are triggering this issue for thousands of others). You might need a different PSU to make it work, even if your old PSU otherwise works fine.

You don't need a 650W PSU, you just need a higher-quality unit. Make a post on this subforum again when you're planning to buy so you don't end up with a crappy 650W. Heck, you could easily run that system off a 450W PSU. You just want something that's a bit more modern and better-made.

Then I'd recommend a higher-quality unit. But yes, 500W is plenty for that setup.

What power supply is it?

What voltage are you running on the vCore and what are your LLC settings?

Those temps seem pretty normal. Leave voltage settings alone on a laptop. The engineers who designed your GPU BIOS will know what's up and what it's doing and undervolting will result in issues like you ended up finding. Unless you bring the clockspeeds of your GPU down, your undervolting will pretty much guarantee issues on any GPU, especially one that's designed to run on battery power.

I thought it couldn't possibly be that bad until I checked out the Glassdoor ratings. So many of them dislike the CEO. Never a good sign. I'll sit with my Mayflower O2/ODAC.

That's an exciting rumor, but we'll see what they end up doing with a lack of supply of GDDR6. I'd be curious to see if they use GDDR5X for lower-end cards. Supply is such an issue right now that many would just take anything

I'm not sure what you mean. That opens the File Explorer for me. Type cmd in the Windows start and right click and select run as administrator, then use the command I suggested.

Open an administrative command prompt and type See if that fixes anything.

I have never done this and I believe you'd need a USB adapter to SATA to work the way you're suggesting, but I could be wrong. You might be able to use the 120 GB as a bootable ISO. I'd recommend just using a USB flash drive like a Sandisk Extreme or Samsung Bar. You'll always have a purpose for one later on if you don't have one already.