Worth answering one question first: what's actually slow? Task Manager during the thing that frustrates you shows whether it's the GPU, RAM or an old drive. Then check your ceiling — CPU socket, PSU connectors, case clearance. If the fix is one part and it fits, swap. If it's three, start fresh.

For that mix the GPU does nearly all the work. At 4K the 5700X limits you far less than it looks, so a card upgrade on your current board buys most of the gain without the DDR5 jump. Worth weighting VRAM and encoder generation heavily — that's what the streaming and editing side leans on.

Since you'd rather not build: the two spec lines that separate a good integrator from a bad one are the PSU and the motherboard. That's where cost gets quietly cut, and they're the parts you can't swap later without pulling the whole thing apart. Also check the RAM is a matched two-stick kit.

That isolation list above is a good one. Two things it misses that bite after a PSU swap: check the CPU 8-pin at the top of the board is fully clicked in — most-missed cable, and it gives exactly this dead-end behaviour — and bench-test the board on its box in case a standoff is shorting it.

Nice haul. One thing that saves panic on a fresh platform: let the first boot sit. Memory training on new RAM can mean minutes of black screen before anything shows. Once the flash finishes, go back into BIOS and re-enable the memory profile — an update usually resets it to default speed.

Lovely thing to do. For Roblox and Minecraft specifically, single-thread speed and RAM do more work than GPU muscle, since both lean hard on the CPU. A modern 6-core with decent integrated graphics runs them well, which leaves the GPU as the upgrade he can save toward next.

Good reminder. One thing worth adding: hold the fan blades still while you blow them out. Spinning a fan with compressed air can push voltage back down the header. And do it outside if you can, otherwise you're mostly relocating the dust into the room.

Worth checking the UPS's watt rating rather than its VA number, if you haven't. They're different figures and the watt one is usually around 60% of the VA. Matching an 850W PSU to an 850VA UPS leaves you short on paper, even though the actual draw is normally well under the PSU's label.

Before the whole rebuild, worth checking you're on hardware encode (NVENC/AV1) rather than x264 if you're streaming off the same machine. That frees a surprising amount of CPU headroom. And if it's in-game stutter rather than dropped frames, that usually points at VRAM, not raw GPU power.

Honestly the best time to learn. Nothing in a modern build is fragile except the CPU socket pins and your patience with the 24-pin. Pick the case and the cooler first, since those two decide how much fighting you do later. The rest genuinely just clicks in.

Laptop dies are tiny, so the usual pea-size advice is too much — closer to a grain of rice. Two things matter more than the paste pattern anyway: get every trace of the old stuff off with 99% isopropyl, and tighten the heatsink screws a little at a time in the numbered order so it seats flat.

The parts are a lot harder to break than they feel. The genuinely delicate moments are short: don't force the CPU (it drops in by gravity, the lever does the work), and push RAM until both clips actually click. The rest is just patience. Waiting for your friend is also a totally reasonable call.

40 to 70 bouncing around is normal — that's the cooler tracking load, not a bad mount. A paste problem doesn't look like that; it looks like a fast climb to 95-100 that stays there. And since the loud one is the 5070, that's the GPU's own fan curve, separate from anything you did to the CPU.