Adorable Cat

seems all good except I hope you mean "3900x" or "3700x", because the 3800x is nothing but a waste of ~$100 over the 3700x

looks like a solid build to me, I don't see anything bad about it. Unless you're doing streaming or production stuff occasionally I would go with a r5 5600x instead, you get about the exact same gaming performance for like $100 less.

Some motherboards (like the one you picked) have a BIOS flashing button that'll allow you to flash the BIOS even if you don't have a cpu for it. You can find out how in your mobo's manual, though a lot of B550/X570 motherboards will say "5000 series compatible" if the manufacturer has already gone and updated it for you.

Everything on that list seems good except the GPU, I know you're waiting for better stuff like a 3080 to be available but a 1050ti is just going to do poorly especially at 1440p. If you guys are fine with that (because hey it'll at least do a lot better than his old mac) I guess it'll do when/is GPUS go back to normal, but personally I'd try to find like a used RX580, 1650 Super, 1660, or something

you could technically solder on a 6 pin connector, but it wouldn't do anything. The board might not even have the circuitry to use the power from the 6 pin connector, in that case it would be entirely useless. Not sure what you mean by "shooting down", like you have bad framerate drops? your GPU is most likely not the cause of that, it might be running low on RAM, your processor (or GPU if video is playing with GPU acceleration or something) could be too weak to run a game and netflix or whatever at the same time, or it could be a software thing, but the power connector wouldn't have any beari

is your college assigning you a project you have to make? are they just telling you to create something using thwe skills you've accumulated so far? your question is exceedingly vague.

if you're looking for something inexpensive you can probably find used Windows Mixed Reality sets used on ebay. I used an HP one for a while and though they're beaten in every way by new or more expensive stuff like the Quest 2, Reverb G2, Index, etc. they're still much better than original Vive/Rift. The only reason I'm upgrading from mine is because I broke it stupidly and I have the money for an index.

alternatively, there's also probably a way to straight up disable the onboard gpu in the BIOS once you have a dedicated card installed so you don't have to bother with nvidia control panel stuff.

if you don't do gaming on it and want to save a buck, 8GB should be plenty for just discord and web browsing and stuff. but if you do any gaming or want to be safe into the future I'd go for 16GB

I don't think you'll have to worry about that, your better power supply should just be compatible with everything else. buuut for educational sake: you'll plug the PCIE power on the 850w psu into the graphics card, and leave everything else to the smaller hp power supply. you'll want to short pin 16 (PS-ON) on the 24 pin connector to any ground pin, which will force the power supply to be on all the time. then that 850w psu is powering the graphics card and the hp psu is just powering the mobo, drives, cpu etc. but that's all pretty irrelevent in this situa

a CPU bottleneck won't damage your GPU, you just won't get anywhere near the performance you could out of it (I think you know this already though). As long as the power supply is compatible with the rest of the system it should work well. even if your 850w PSU won't work because the motherboard has proprietary power connectors on it (though from what I see online it doesn't look like it does) you could still get it to work in less than beautiful ways.

considering you need the water to be below ambient (assuming your room is like 20-22c), you'll definitely need something to chill the water. A radiator could only theoretically get the water down to room temperature, since that's the temperature the air is at already.

Summary Gabe Newell (Valve founder) has partnered with Rocket Lab to include a 5 inch titanium replica of the gnome on the Electron rocket launching from New Zealand on Thursday. "Gnome Chompski" was originally featured in Half Life 2: Episode 2 where players could get an achievement by carrying him through the game and then placing him inside a rocket. In addition, Gabe has pledged to donate 1 dollar for every viewer of the launch to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the New Zealand Starship Children's Hospital. Quotes My thoughts As a huge ha