[Robbie Ferguson]

Really great suggestions, lovedfriend.

Again, that's a +1 for Ryzen. Though the one you selected is probably under-powered for this build.

I am a little hesitant to go the route of an ASRock motherboard, as in my experience they are more of a "budget" board than a "good" board. If I was trying to build an extremely cheap system, I may go that route - but for this system I think we want to lean more toward quality than low cost, and find a happy medium.

I feel the same way about that video card. I am happy to go with EVGA (they make nice cards for the price) but the card itself seems grossly under-powered for this build.

Would love to hear back from you and other viewers about my comments above. Let's build from this... if we are going to go the Ryzen route (more power for the money) I want to make sure the other peripherals are up to the task.

I love the PCIe M.2 line from Kingston. Though the motherboard I'd picked (with the Intel chipset) has M.2 onboard, so no need for the riser. So we could choose the drive based on whether or not the board we go with has M.2 onboard. Another note, the larger capacity Kingston M.2's are faster, so I might lean toward a larger capacity. I'd also stay away from such a small spinning drive... really no point in adding something so miniscule. May as well just get a bigger M.2 at that rate, or stick a cheap SATA SSD in for data.

Thoughts? Thanks so much for the great list! Really has me thinking, along with Nicd's suggestion.... hmm....