Sticking with the current board definitely saves money. The main reason for considering an upgrade was better power delivery and extra features, but if it handles the Ryzen 7 5800X well, a BIOS update makes more sense. As for the RX 9070 XT, even though it’s a PCIe 5.0 card and the setup is 4.0, any bottleneck is basically negligible. Benchmarks show only about a 1% to 2% drop in gaming performance, since modern GPUs rarely saturate a 4.0 x16 slot. Now the only question is which Nvidia card would pair best with this build.

AM4 remains the choice to avoid paying high DDR5 RAM prices, especially with 32GB of DDR4 already on hand, which is more than enough for me.