It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our Q&A show where each week a member of the team answers your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

This week Allyn's back for a variety of questions:

00:26 – Samsung has said they are going to slow down DRAM and NAND production to keep prices high. Would Samsung be able to slow production enough to stop prices for the end consumer from falling further than they already have? Bonus question, how low do you think price per gig will go on TLC and MLC?

06:06 – I am building a new home desktop/server for Emby and it needs a new HDD. What’s the most important factor to consider: amount of cache, rotational speed, or SATA type? Regarding the CPU, would a Ryzen 5 or 7 be adequate for streaming up to four videos from the server at 1080p?

12:47 – Does higher L3 cache per core increase single-threaded performance? If so, does this mean for example that the i7-8700K has faster single-threaded performance than the i5-8600K if frequency is same and hyper-threading is off?

15:48 – The Spectre/Meltdown microcode updates hit Broadwell-E processors hard in terms of performance. In Windows 10 1803 you could hide the patch (KB4100347) and everything was fine. Do you know how this will work in Windows 10 1809? Is the microcode update still something that can be skipped, or is it rolled into the 1809 update?

20:21 – Are there any CPUs available now that have hardware-based fixes for Spectre and Meltdown? If not, is there a timetable of when they may be available?

24:28 – What are considered to be “silicone sensitive areas” within a PC or laptop? I’m looking to replace the TIM on my laptop (Lenovo E585) to cut down on fan noise and I saw that as a marketing bullet on some Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut.

Want to have your question answered on a future Mailbag? Leave a comment on this post or in the YouTube comments for the latest video. Check out new Mailbag videos (usually) each week!

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