Project Man Cave Part 3: Motherboard and NVME M.2 SSD

I have finally made some more progress on Project Man Cave. The gaming PC I've been dreaming of building from scratch for years and year and years.

Last week, I made a big purchase. I got the motherboard, and a 500gig NVME M.2 SSD.

Two more parts to go, then I can assemble the machine.

Anyway, here's what I got:

Motherboard

After reading up on the Z390 chipset, and the various options out there, I decided on the Gigabyte Z390 GAMING X. This one https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z390-GAMING-X-rev-10#kf

It cost me about R2800 here in SA. It's not the top of range by a long shot, but seeing as this PC will literally only be for gaming, it's more than sufficient for what I'll need.

Ahh that new motherboard smell!

Storage

As for storage, I've opted for the 500gig Western Digital SN750.

Wow these things are tiny! I have plenty of storage in the house, so won't be getting dedicated storage for now, the NAS will serve that purpose just fine for the time being. Can't wait to see what this tiny SSD is capable of, until now I've only ever experienced regular old SSD's...

What remains are the RAM, and of course the CPU and graphics card. I currently game on a GTX970, so I'll be getting the RAM and CPU next and moving the 970 to this machine, until the next generation of nVidia cards get launched, which will probably be around mid 2020.

I had a look at some benchmarks, specifically to compare my current CPU, which is a 8 year old i7-2600, with the i7-9700k, and just the CPU upgrade alone will give me like a 50% frame rate increase at least! So I'm happy to keep on gaming on that graphics card until the next generation gets released. I'll probably be looking at the RTX3070 or equivalent.

The final, and extremely nice to have items, will be kitting the man cave out with an air conditioner (will get that done winter 2020, around July or so), a recliner type chair, and a big 55" 4k TV.

Anyway, Project Man Cave is definitely still a go, and, although it's a bit slower than I hoped for, the end result will just be all that much sweeter!

Cheers for now!