Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
"Meh". You may actually have more of a gain by closing a bunch of the perforations in your case to get better ducting of cool air to components that actually need it, and the tape to do that will be way cheaper than new fans.
I love my Noctua CPU fan (and the actual cooler... sooooo good), but...
Speedstep and other automatisms in that area can be regarded as a black art, and as long as the system is stable, it's probably normal. Your board also has that wacko "EPU" feature that you should disable since it will only make any weird behaviour even worse by trying to dynamically fudge...
The PSU was one of the things I considered and replaced without any marked improvement. The old one did make some noise while cooling down after high load (primary side still 20% under rated secondary load), but all in all it doesn't seem to have been the issue.
The freezes are also entirely...
I've had a real streak with trying to upgrade my system (mostly Phenom II X6, 16GB ECC RAM in 4 modules on the QVL of all involved mainboards, Radeon HD 6950 on an Asus M5A89TD Pro) by putting in a new graphics card (R9 280x), new CPU (FX 6300) and board (Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0).
(Drama ahead...
Sadly, more like "someone with a cellphone that has been bathed in grease and has roughly the image quality of a '70s pr0n flick that has been copied too many times". :rolleyes:
And well, you can apparently park the car under some retarded chunks of metal like an F150, so it still gets a...