High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics

Not only that, but mid range cards just haven’t really moved that much in terms of performance. The ultra high end used to be a terrible value only for people who want the best and didn’t care about money. Now it almost makes sense from a performance per dollar standpoint to go ultra high end. At launch the 4090 was almost twice the performance of the 4080, but only cost about 1.5x. And somehow the value gets worse the lower end you go.

Meanwhile mid-high end cards like the 4060 and 7600 (which used to be some of the best values) are barely outperforming their predecessors.

As long as OP has something newer than a 1st gen zen CPU and MOBO 3200 should be easily doable on all 4 sticks, but it probably won’t be officially supported.

Windows 11 has also had its mica affect for a while now, and windows 10 had something similar.

I really doubt OP will have any performance issues with a 9700x and the D15s cooler, and because it’s a noctua fan it will be inaudible. I have the older NH-D14 and my 5800x3d rarely even touches 70c, and that’s with bad mounting/thermal paste and an RTX 4090 dumping 300+ watts of extra heat. When I did it right the first time it would never leave the 60s. And that’s in a much older Fractal Define R4 which is not known for airflow. My friend with an overclocked 5900x has no issues on his D15.

I do agree with opting for an x670/e board for longevity, but a B650e will also get OP the pcie 5 slots and those don’t cost much more than a b650.

Are there any iPhone 16’s in the US that have a physical SIM? I thought the 14 dropped sim, and I know for my 15 I had to import one from Canada to get the SIM.

No carrier is what you want. If you aren’t financing you should never opt for the carrier locked version.

Apple charges the exact same price for a carrier locked one as a carrier unlocked one.

Yes, as long as you don’t buy it from a carrier, or buy a carrier specific version from some 3rd party seller it will work. Typically if you buy from a 3rd party seller and ask for “an iphone” you’ll get the unlocked version, but some stores only carry carrier locked versions so they should ask what carrier you have first. If they do make sure you ask for the unlocked version.

If you’re in the US you’ll need to deal with eSIM setup, if you’re in the rest of the world just pop your sim card in and it will work.

Even better there’s whole head units designed to fin nicely into the dash and look relatively OEM. My co worker was looking at one that was like $300 but came with a massive nice screen vs the stock 6” display.

1080p at 24” looks kinda like butt. My last monitor was 1440p at 25” and that I thought was perfection. 2x anti aliasing was all you needed to make everything look nice, but it wasn’t hard to run. 4k isn’t worth it unless you have a REALLY big screen. It takes so much more power to draw 4k vs 1440p and at regular monitor sizes it doesn’t really look that much better.

Also my 1080 absolutely struggled to play games, even at 1080p (what I’d have to revert to when it couldn’t run them at 4k). I tried battlefield 2042 but I struggled to even get 60 fps in that. This Reddit post from 3 years ago mirrors that so I know it’s not just me. And looking at black ops 6 the 1080 would struggle to run that at over 100 gps on anything other than the bare minimum settings.

It’s almost like they need something to keep them from falling onto the ground when they slip out of your ear.

I think you need to find a different ear tip my dude. Unless I’m doing something extreme I’ve never had them just fall out. I’ve had 30+ seconds of warning that they’re slipping out of my ear before they’d fall out, but almost never just “whoops I’m free”.

In terms of bandwith to stream things you won’t have a problem. Some high quality stuff can get to around 55Mbps (bits per second). But most streaming services send you the lowest quality shit imaginable so you’re probably using less than 20 at any given moment.

That data cap is much more concerning to me, how much streaming do you do? At 10Mbps (typical streaming quality) that’s about 3 straight days of watching video which sounds like a lot. But many AAA games are >100GB in size and that’s 1/3 of your data right there.

Modern Tom’s hardware

actually trying

Not possible.

or rely on Windows update to give you reasonably recent drivers.

Windows update: I see you just installed this driver from 3 weeks ago, let me just revert to a driver from 2021 for ya.

Just like gsync died

(true) gsync isn’t dead, it’s only in the highest end of monitors which is basically where it’s always been. It only “died” because it requires an expensive module vs adaptive sync being built into basically every modern display controller so it’s basically free.

Have you tried the pomodoro method to try to help force yourself to take breaks?

The worst part is that I’m hyperly aware that I’m doing it the whole time and I really want to stop but I just want shake myself off of it.

I’d probably seek profession help on that one. That sounds like a legitimate addition.

I thought they still made games for the non series X/S/One but apparently they stopped in 2023.

Well either way I felt the same way about the original one. I got mine in 2018 and I’ve played less than 100 hours of games on it, and never actually bought any games for it (I got it second hand with about 6 games).

In general I think AAA games just aren’t worthwhile, let alone AAA exclusives. There’s a lot of great indie games, but that requires going through the sludge of indie games.

Then they still get your money and it’s at the higher cut.

Why would MS care if you already have a PC? The console sale itself doesn’t really make them money, it’s the games. And if you’re still buying their games on PC they still get their (albeit lower) cut.

Both Seagate and WD’s drives are pretty loud, but being that they’re helium filled (and sealed off) they’re not as loud as they could be. I think the quietest drives are shucked WD Easystore drives since they purposefully throttle the head’s speed.

If this is just mass storage on your desktop then I’d just skip the raid and grab two WD Easystores and don’t shuck them. Connect them up and power them on as needed. Have one be the “main” drive that you actually use, then periodically copy over all the data to the second drive to have a backup. Two 18-22TB drives gets you the same amount of usable space as raid 5 on multiple 10-12tb drives, it costs a lot less (they go on sale all the time at best buy). Plus you then get an actual backup instead of raid’s redundancy.