Recent content by PCG Jarred

I wish I could give a wholehearted recommendation to Clonezilla, but it has plenty of quirks -- the worst being there's no good way to clone from a larger drive to a smaller SSD. Macrium Reflect however is available for free, and has worked great for me.

Assuming you're talking about "optional upgrades" at the time of purchase, these days I'd try and get a 144Hz display, RTX 2060 or better, 6-core/12-thread or better CPU, 16GB RAM (32GB bonus!), and a 1TB SSD. That should be possible in a sub-$2000 laptop that's pretty thin and light. I think...

Seems more likely that something else is causing problems rather than DirectX. Maybe a file or driver got corrupted in the update, or maybe it's something else. Post specs, though.

Not to be an echo chamber, but ... the only reason to get a better motherboard would be if you're doing serious overclocking. Or if you don't like the look of a motherboard, but since you presumably liked the way the TUF looks before buying it, I can't imagine it's a problem now.