Recent content by kira-faye

You're going to have to go OLED (or higher end IPS/VA marketed to artists rather than gamers) to get significantly more consistent and higher quality color. Either way, your budget isn't going to be sufficient.

Don't plan on selling the H1 unless you got a late production AIO - the earlier ones clog up with mixed metal corrosion to the point of being useless over time.

If you're already mostly on PS5 for gaming, sell your desktop now while it's still worth anything (though I doubt you'll get much for it). Sell the PS5 and get the PS5 Pro when those become available this winter. I'm sure you can clear some space on the iPad, maybe pull all the impatient stuff...

Every few months, 3-4 "big" titles a year, though that's slowing down as life gets more complicated. I always get the latest Destiny 2 expansion, but that's run its course and feels as much a relief as anything, and I do get Humble Choice monthly, but am thinking about letting that go as well.

You're running DDR4, so if you go AM5 you will have to get new RAM - so far as I know all AM5 boards required DDR5, and this is at least part of where their (negligible, depending on your use case) speed advantage comes from. Assuming your board will support the 5700X3D (make sure you update...

As long as you can live with the nose [noise ?] that will be fine, yes.

If you have space for it, one of the big cheap dual tower Thermalright heatsinks like the Peerless Assassin would be the easy, cost-effective way to go. Depending on what you're playing the 3600 could prove to be plenty, though - especially if you're using a 60Hz display.

You're supposed to, and yes, it can potentially cause a problem... ... But I've swapped many laptop drives over the years without disconnecting the battery and got away with it. Will you? No guarantee. In most machines it's pretty obvious which connection you need to pull.

Yes - download DDU, then restart in safe mode and run it to clear the drivers out, then restart back to normal and install the latest drivers. Also uninstall Afterburner and any other overclock utilities you may have.

If you've got two fans on a 360 radiator, that's the place to start. And if the case is especially restrictive (which it appears to be), replacing it is a relatively inexpensive (in the greater scheme) but annoying option, since you'll have to transplant all the components. If I were in your...

Is the plastic itself actually sweating something? It's rare, but I have seen really cheap plastic develop a greasy sheen before. What headphones are these?

Short answer is, if you just go turn all the settings to max (especially at 4K) absolutely nothing currently available will run 2077 smoothly. Bad example.

If it couldn't read the stick it wouldn't see the file or give you the option to flash it. Modern machines are much less picky about drive format than they used to be, nothing to worry about.

The 5700X3D is the current sweet spot for an upgrade, I agree. It's that or a full rebuild going to a 7 series X3D, which won't be cost effective.

You're running bone stock RAM speed and timings, and I bet everything you're comparing to is running XMP with fairly fast kits. That board is starving the CPU.