FMod

It's not a SSD problem, it's a Windows problem. Some folders are hidden, you won't see everything. 1) Run built-in disk cleanup. You may have 'recycle bin' and other junk files. 2) Run admin command prompt and enter "powercfg.exe /hibernate off" 3) Delete system junk like C:\Nvidia (for others, google if you should before deleting them) 4) Delete user junk like your Downloads folder. 5) Optional: Download PatchCleaner and run that. 6) Reboot and run disk cleanup again. 7) Optional: Compress all folders on your drive C: - just folders, never the root Ask or google if anything was unclear. I assume you've fixed the obvious. If you have stuff like games on your drive C: (steam library in default location), that's where the space went. If nothing helps, 8) Refresh or reinstall Windows. It's the first thing most PC shops do anyway.

Never buy old crap unless it's pre-owned and really cheap (like 40% of new price). With your budget, a used PC will be by far the best option, provided you don't get a lemon. Building a PC out of a mix of used and new parts may be an even better option, but it takes considerably more skill than picking a used PC (you can run that one by us here to check it's good). Ideally you'd want a used i3, FX-6300 or better mobo+CPU+RAM package, a used case (readily available for $0), some used storage HDD (generally starting from $5) and a new video card and SSD.

It's fine. You can upgrade the 680 for the 1070 or the 1080. It probably won't help in Skyrim, but should in FO4. Your CPU is fine, but you're running it wrong - the 3770K is meant to be overclocked (the K literally stands for that). It should do 4.2 GHz effortlessly by simply entering BIOS and setting all its turbo ratios to 42. That's 20% more speed you're not using.

Install NVSE. http://nvse.silverlock.org/ Or uninstall RTS.

I think the best monitor you could get under $1,000 today is either this: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Multi-Client-Monitor-P4317Q-DisplayPort/dp/B01FM3IPS8 Or this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11038/philips-bdm4037uw-goes-on-sale-40-inch-4k-curved-display-for-800 - but I don't seem to find them on sale in the US. Functionally, 34" 21:9 displays are like the poor man's version of 40" 16:9 - same width, less height. But, for some games 21:9 is better due to wider FOV, if you can't just set FOV via console/config/etc. For others, 21:9 just doesn't work right. In general, you have to choose between 4K and framerates above 60 or freesync/gsync. If you're into games like Fallout 4, you're way better off with going UHD than chasing framerate. Fallout has plenty of high-res textures and no problems setting FOV to where you want it. 4K will pay off in slightly older games, where you'll run it at full 60 fps, and long-term. IPS and VA panels are about equal, different strengths/weaknesses. TN panels are inferior, especially on large screens. If a 40-43" is too large, 34" is a valid choice, but they're not as large as you'd expect. Anything would be a big improvement over what you're using now, though.

CPU failures in the absence of hard o/c are rare (but not unheard of). CPU failures also tend to be abrupt, it won't even begin to start. Motherboards and PSU have a limited lifespan and fail "when", not "if". Normal use overheating wouldn't cause startup failures. Your case sounds like a short circuit on the motherboard or something connected to it. It also might be an unseated CPU, and a PSU issue is fairly likely as well. Start by taking your PC apart, cleaning it, putting it back together. Include removing the CPU, cleaning off the thermal grease, reapplying it (a small amount). Needless to say, disconnect everything you don't need to start. You actually don't need any of the fans.

Very different utilities. Wrye Bash is primarily a mod conflict resolver for people who know what they're doing and want advanced mod compatibility functions with its patch, or the ability to micromanage mod installs. NMM is an "all in one" mod installer with its special function being some integration with this website to know when new versions of your major mods come out. It works fine with non-conflicting mods.

It isn't bad, but not worth it (and I'm running a previous Asus ROG board right now, so). The 7700K is a really lousy sequel in the series. Just get a much cheaper board like Asrock Z270 Pro4 - it's got stellar reviews and that's more than enough for the price. I wouldn't even splurge for the i7, just get the i5. IDK in how long exactly, but this CPU series is on its way to being obsolete - in a couple years, either 6-8 cores go mainstream, or new cores come with serious IPC gains. Also about 1080 SLI - these are two soon-to-be-surpassed cards. With the 1080 Ti getting delayed again, you could consider 2x1070 for most of the performance at a much lower price. If your display is anything less than 4K, you don't need even that much. Or, if you're serious and money's no object, go for the LGA 2011 platform. As everything, it's also on its way to obsoletion, but right now it's better, not that much more expensive, and there's been no gains in the mainstream anyway.

W/e you do, don't get the Losers' Edition. Unless you're doing SLI and even then just get that KFA2 clown thingy, which is essentially the same, but cheaper. ElectricMessiah: Your prices are crazy for the US. The same newegg website lists: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487265&cm_re=gtx_1070-_-14-487-265-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16814125875 Cheaper and actually better.

Yes, it is. But you don't help it by getting BOTH a M.2 drive and a 3.5" SATA drive. You do help it by buying one drive at a time. NB: Most M.2 drives are still SATA drives. Only some are NVMe.

Right now I have a 950 Pro 512GB with Win10 (Insider) and a Crucial M500 with Win10, plus a bunch of other SSD on SATA and PCI-E (but none with a functioning OS). Until the 960 Pro launched 2 months ago, the 950 Pro was about the fastest M.2 SSD you could get. The M500 was one of the slowest major brand SSD when it came out 3.5 years ago, coming to the bottom of most charts even against some drives that were already out of production. The result? There is no discernible difference at all between the performance of Windows on my 950 Pro and my M500. I know it can be measured, but I couldn't for my life tell which one I'm running, unless Insider just got a new feature or I looked up system folders. I could try a stopwatch, but the result will depend on my reaction time more than hardware performance. This isn't my first migration from SSD to another; I've been using them since the Intel X25. The one constant has been that, as long as you only use good drives, you don't (or at least I didn't) feel anything different when moving the system from one SSD to a faster one. I hoped to get a small boot time advantage from the 950 Pro, but the mobo takes so long for a full boot that it doesn't matter, and wakeup is essentially instant either way. Even if you are someone who can tell the difference... would having a slightly faster Windows be that important on a desktop? It's not a laptop that you open and close 20 times a day and wake up from inactivity while open another 30 times. You wake your PC up once, it's up and running by the time you've moved your hand from the power button to the mouse, and put it back to sleep at the end of the day. There's no battery, you don't put it to sleep every minute. There are some workloads where you do feel the difference, like tossing up Mass Effect 3's whole storage with Texplorer, or splicing some 4K video, or using it for your swap file when 128 GB just isn't enough for the renderer. But these workloads have nothing to do with Windows, they're all about rearranging very large amounts of data, as opposed to loading up lots of small scattered libraries. So when I add the 960 Pro, I won't be wasting it on Windows. While the 960 Evo is a great deal overall, it's still $245 for the 250 GB version plus a 480 GB budget drive. A single 750 GB drive is $170; you can spend $75 more elsewhere to a better effect. Or, for the same $245, you can get a MX300 1050 GB for an extra 320 GB of SSD storage. If the $75 doesn't matter, two drives still isn't the way to go. At the pace the storage market is moving, you really don't want to spread yourself thin. With most mobos, you only get one PCI-E M.2 slot - don't waste it on a compromise. If you can afford and want the 960 Evo, my advice is to buy one large enough to last you; otherwise, buy a SATA SSD and keep your M.2 and PCI-E lanes free. Otherwise, 2 years down the road, you'll find yourself in a situation when you want to upgrade to whatever NVMe drive rules the market then, but you have nowhere to put it in, unless you waste time and money migrating your system and selling off the old drive. If I've learned one thing from all my upgrade experience since floppies and mechanical drives, it's to always buy the largest drive with reasonable $/GB that you foresee yourself filling up within the next year. Small drives end up in the trash, large drives stay in the system.

The pebbles scene is impressive mostly because the pebbles are actually modeled - you know they're not going to be in a game. The rest is fairly representative of the kind of content you'd find in a game, except for the interior scenes, which look very much like modern commercial architectural and design renderings.

The 1080p outperforms the 980Ti everywhere period. Maybe bar a few irrelevant outlier exceptions. It's also better in terms of power consumption and everything else. Your 980 is not holding back Oblivion unless you're doing something extreme[ly pointless]. Turn Vsync on if you haven't already.

Is this even a question - it should not be. Or, at least, you're asking the wrong questions. 1. Why even bother upgrading a 980? Which specific DX9 game is it insufficient in? 2. If you have an answer to (1) and it's not a CPU-dependent thing, in which a new GPU won't help you, it's very likely that a 980Ti won't be sufficient either. While VRAM above 4GB is inaccessible to most DX9 games, the added GPU power is.

With the RX 480, you have to pay some extra for custom designs. Overall it's usually slightly better value for the money. You won't go wrong with it or the 1060, it will be down to percentage points. Both 4GB and 8GB versions make sense, the latter version more sense. One argument in favor of the 1060 is that custom 1060s often feature excellent cooling, same as goes into their 1080 counterparts, but at much lower power draw. Only go for the 6GB version, not the 3GB. The rest of your rig is reasonably close to perfect, don't mess with that.

Your CPU is almost as good as they get already. For the GTX 1070, it's good value, although your 960 is a fairly fast card as well. No games currently use all the 8 GB, but the 1070s can be paired up in SLI. In Skyrim, performance gains will be very limited, as it's bound by excessive single-threaded scripts. In modern games, you'll get higher framerates. Whether it's worth the price depends on how much its price means to you.

960M vs 970M is actually a huge difference. The 960M is the lower-range chip from the first-generation Maxwell. For all intents, it's a GTX 750Ti in a laptop. The 970M is actually a GTX 970/980 chip with 3 more SM disabled (10 left out of 16) and clocked down. For this reason, the 970M has similar power draw (with Vsync on), but more than 1.5 times the performance. Is it worth the $320 price difference though (on Amazon)? I'd say not. But, the MSI is also a better laptop overall, not such an obvious cost-cutting exercise as the Dell. For drive size, get the SSD version, you can add a HDD for cheap later when the warranty's out or you're OK with losing the remainder.

It's totally and completely safe. If the slot looks like a 16x, you can always install x16 cards in it. Basically as long as it fits. You might lose a negligible bit in performance, as the 2nd x16 slot usually runs as 8x. The only game I recall where the loss was meaningful was Alan Wake, and it's half a decade old.

As an aside, it's usually better to have VSync on, unless playing competitive e-sports kind of games (doesn't really make a difference in SP). But glad the problem was solved.

But I'm not theorizing either, I've also had specific personal experience with the first consumer SSD generation. My first home SSD was an Intel X25, and, in 2008, I think I count as an early adopter, can't recall anyone else outside of hardcore enthusiast circles who had any flash drive other than USB sticks and SD cards. This drive has been running perfectly for me until a year back, when I just ran out of ports, and AFAIK so it does for its new owner. The problem did exist. But it wasn't universal - at the same time, enterprise SSD were well-developed, getting common, and didn't suffer from anywhere near the range of problems cheap consumer drives did. IOW, IMO, bad consumer SSD was a problem of trying to do them on the cheap - and botching it - more so than that of the flash technology itself.

AotS is a full DX12 game that can do multi-GPU (which is NOT SLI or CFX) with any two DX12 GPU, even different brands.

GTX 1060 can't SLI.

I guess there's a better option for the PSU: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438055 Same price, 650W is still lot of headroom, but Platinum units are a bit higher quality inside. Other than that, nothing to improve on within the budget.

That's not a good build, but why look a gift horse in the mouth. It will run Skyrim with a reasonable amount of mods at good frame rates.

Yes, there was a time when really low quality SSD were prevalent on the consumer market. Their problems were mostly due to old Jmicron controllers, they sucked. But even that it wasn't so much about running out of cycles as it was about poorly designed controllers. Although these controllers certainly did kill some drives with write amplification. I wasn't trying to showoff or anything, just elaborated on a point more than was necessary. (As for large companies with 24/7 databases, they work with more complex storage solutions than a single SSD or HDD array in the first place. I recalled a situation that's more familiar to me and closer in scope to consumer drive choice.)