Ask the Experts - Page 12

Is my system ready for a 1440p 144Hz monitor and Cyberpunk 2077?

Question by Jean from United States | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Video Cards & GPUs | Mar 22, 2020 6:45 PM CDT

I built my first PC a couple years ago and got some deals where I could and made the best decisions based on my budget. I currently have an ASRock Z370M, i5 8600K, 8GB of DDR4 3000, and a GTX 1070 Ti.

At this point, I really have my eye on a new 1440p 144Hz monitor and am curious if my GPU or CPU will need to be updated to handle this? This is a gaming machine only and I really want to crank up Cyberpunk 2077 when it releases.

Can I replace the HDD in Seagate's Expansion external drive?

Question by Taylor from United States | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Storage | Mar 18, 2020 8:24 PM CDT

Weird question for you guys but I got my hands-on a batch of 10TB WD Red and I'm wondering if you see any technical issues replacing my 2TB Seagate Expansions drive with one of these? I think the Expansion uses a 7200RPM drive so power should be similar.

Some concerns about cooling a hot running OG Xbox One

Question by William from United States | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Cases, Cooling & PSU | Mar 10, 2020 7:52 PM CDT

I'm looking for a USB solution that will allow me to control a PC case fan as I don't want it to spin really slow with just the 5v that USB can supply.

I also don't want to rig it to 12v and have it running full speed all the time either. I need this to add additional cooling to my OG Xbox One as the top is always really hot and it seems to have lost performance.

Do I need to leave storage space free on my SSD for best performance?

Question by Leifur from United States | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Storage | Mar 6, 2020 7:35 PM CST

I have a Samsung 860 QVO SSD 2TB as a secondary drive with my OS on another SSD. I use the 2TB drive to store games and it makes sense to me that as such it is used mostly to READ as it is loading games and very little WRITE going on. I have it filled with about 40GB left and showing red in My Computer.

I assumed I could fill the SSD space as there is no need to defrag and have all that space free to do it. I searched the web and came up with many views on forums many said you need 10-30% disc space left blank or performance drops badly. Others said some modern SSDs have a 16GB hidden partition that takes care of this need and you can fill disc. I think I should be able to mostly fill my 860 as it should be just reading game data in loading and playing with no reason to write much as OS is elsewhere.

Do I need to leave 450GB blank??

Concerns with the performance of NZXT X62 and X63 AIO coolers

Question by Stephan from Netherlands | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Cases, Cooling & PSU | Mar 2, 2020 8:08 PM CST

Hi,

I'm in the market for a double AIO setup (using Kraken G12) and am looking at what NZXT has to offer. I've seen your review about the X62 which seems outstanding. It then baffles me that the X53 (though 40mm smaller) gets such a relatively poor review. Why is that? Is the same to be expected for the X63 (and will there be a review for this?)

Thanks in advance!

Assistance on which case fans, cooler, and memory to buy for new rig

Question by James from United States | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Computer Systems | Feb 27, 2020 8:14 PM CST

I'm building a new PC and I'm super overwhelmed by a few parts and find a few parts to be really tough to figure out what to buy.

Case fans, AIO cooler, and RAM. The rankings/benchmarks for them seem all over the place and I'm having a hard time figuring out what's "the best" to go with.

I'm buying a 2080 Ti and i9-9900k with an ASUS Maximus XI motherboard, but I can't seem to find any resource as to what I should do as far as the other parts I listed above. Does TweakTown have any dropdown rankings or maybe any recommendations as to these parts?

Upgrading the 256GB SSD in my Dell XPS laptop to a 1TB sized drive

Question by Andrew from United States | Answered by Tyler Bernath | Storage | Feb 22, 2020 8:28 PM CST

I have an XPS laptop with a PM961 NVMe 256GB drive, but need to replace it with a 1TB size drive. I would like the replacement to not be a regression in performance compared to the original, but most premium PCIe 3.0 SDDs are costly.

Can I replace it with PCIe 4.0 drive and expect to see benchmarks equal or better than the original?

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