After purchasing a brand new pre-built from Microcenter (mostly for the GPU & RAM inside), I didn't even boot the Microsoft garbage – started straight into Ubuntu 26 USB installer, formatted, and was up and running immediately. Now this new 5070Ti purrs more-happily...

Sillily, the RGB-bullshit 32GB RAM sticks were cheaper than identical unlits... but I do wish I'd paid more for the latter now, because I'm going to [eventually] have to get inside of these stupid gimmicky LED-covers and tear them all directly off the PCB – so fucking stupid [RGB hardwired onto RAM is, without a physical switchoff].

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tl;dr: I don't care what Microslop does or does not recommend, because I would never in my lifetime be caught using anything post-Win7Pro (if it had to be MSFT).