Maximusfoximus

You will inevitably use VMs at somepoint which take up a fair bit of RAM and 10s of GB of storage per instance. That's in addition to all of the other programs and browser tabs that you will have open. Even 16GB of RAM is pretty easy to over utilize.
 
Cloud storage is good for documents but is very poor for any larger files like VMs. So yes I would get something with 512GB of storage.
 
You could do it with 8GB of RAM and 256GB storage but it won't be a pleasant experience as your system will slow down a lot from having to go to swap space. 

There is no need to worry. And especially no need to upgrade because something MIGHT be the case.
If 16gb Ram is truly necessary, you will notice it. Do not think about it before that happens.
 
A Windows VM, if you need to run a specific Windows Application will work on 8gb too, even tho you should keep Multitasking low then. Parallels puts 6gb Ram on the Windows VM out of the box, i didn't change that since i have 16gb Ram.
You might as well reduce that to 5gb or even 4gb.
I had to use the VM for Business Intelligence stuff.
 
For ComputerScience, you probably won't even need a VM, as most things run on M1.
And there's always the possibility of something like Linode, if it's just for a few Months.
 
If you ever DO notice, that your stuff don't run well, you can upgrade then. But only then. Save your Money.
 
Don't forget, CS was possible 5 and 10 years ago too. and i'm sure, most students didn't had 16gb Ram.

You’ve got a perfectly capable machine that will last you way beyond your school, and as @Darkseth said - you’ll know when you need more.
 
Also if a course will require smth beefier or incompatible - it might just be that course, and you can survive with a cloud solution or a lab pc.
 
Most of cs courses don’t need much horsepower.
 
Also here’s some extra advices:
- learn touch typing
- get familiar with terminal and git
- learn some bash
- give Vim a chance (maybe even emacs)
- always follow naming conventions

This is a really solid pick, you should go for it. $200 is often what a 1070 goes for 

Personally, I like skins that fit my personality, intrests, and knowledge. That's why I like things that mirror metals or carbon fibre, geometric patters, as well as camo due to my interest in military.
Everyone I talk to who put skins on things, they feel so much better when their device mirrors their personality. Maybe you should try it, because it could help your decision.

I would suggest updating your bios. This should make sure you are on the most stable version. If your already up to date, try clearing the CMOS and hard unplugging for 30 seconds to reset the mobo completely and drain the onboard battery. Also if your cpu is overclocked try increasing the voltage a tad as sometimes the memory controller gets extra hungry. 

Check to make sure your fan is plugged into “cpu fan” rather then any other header. If your system detects no cpu fan, it may often not boot.

personally, i will go with the black pho leather look. the white marble look, looks like it will catch all the dirt in the world.

Kind of annoying they can't even be arsed to credit us... 

I have a 1080ti in my system and when I overclock I use superposition, heaven, or valley, which are all great tests. If you are looking for a raw score, I would use cinabench gpu and compare it to online scores. Here is mine for reference if you want to use it to compare:

I personally would go with the 1070 for three main reasons: driver maturity, video memory size, and ray tracing quality of 2060.
 
In terms of driver maturity, the 1070 has many years and many game launches since its release and those games run extremely well on the pascal architecture. Many games were specifically built with pascal in mind and Nvidia has has several years to perfect drivers for those chips.
 
Even though the Rtx 2060 may have faster video memory overall, in my experience in video memory it’s quantity over quality. Games, especially AAA ones, devour that memory with high resolution textures and it should give you more breathing room as future games release more complex textures in the future. 
 
If if you watched Linus’s review of the 2060, it is not that much faster than the 1070 and your paying for that “ray tracing” that, as Linus had said, really doesn’t make sense on a mid teir gpu like the 2060 as you would have to drop to like 720p low to use it. 
 
Overall it it is ultimately the description of raw speed over raw compute power, but based on those three reasons and the fact that modern games are still using rasterization anyway, the 1070 seems like a good bet, plus it’s a while 100 dollars cheaper and that is nothing to scoff at. The dual fans will also give it a boost speed advantage.

If you are going to run at stock I would suggest an i5 9400. It should run at higher stock speeds then what you have, give you a few extra cores, and save you some hard earned cash. You would only buy those top teir chips for high FPS gaming and if you were planning to overclock where your graphics card was so powerful and spitting frames so fast that the cpu would actually become the bottleneck. Given your situation and your gpu an i5 would be perfect, would not bottleneck you in any way, and most importantly save you a lot of money. It would also allow you to get a cheaper mobo since you don’t need a z series board to overclock. Your current i5 is only a bottleneck now due to the slower clock speeds of the sky lake generation, where really any cofeelake or newer cpu should suit your purpose in that department even out of the box.
 
If you are planning on overclocking in the future tho to do some experimentation, the 9600k would be a good bet and would be perfect for your situation as well. Those top teir i7s are mostly overkill for anything below a 2080 or 2080ti. 
 
Hope this helps and happy gaming  

Try using this tool: http://www.coolermaster.com/power-supply-calculator/ 
 
Hope that helps
 

That is normal, it does the same for me with my ASUS Z170-DELUXE.
 
It is required and recommended to also clear CMOS just before the update as well. The CMOS is cleared because the configuration settings stored in the CMOS might be incompatible with the new version of the UEFI BIOS, and to prevent instability during the update.

This might be because the damaged PSU can only output a certain amount of wattage and voltage before it powers off

This sounds a lot like a PSU issue. If you want to replace something to see if its the problem I would swap the power supply. I don't know exactly how long you've had it, but they can blow any time. If its not the PSU its likely the motherboard, but based on your symptoms, I would say it is indeed the power supply. Hope this helps. 

The best way to get longevity out of your Mobo is to never apply to much pressure to it when moving it or installing new things inside of it, always make sure that you do not work on a carpet when touching it, and to make sure it touches no metal beyond the standoffs in your case. Basically just do that and make sure you have a high-quality power supply and your board should last for years. 

I agree. Even Linus says SLI is a sham. It doesn't really improve your framerates that significantly, and you can use that money to get a better CPU. Now is a good time to sell anyway considering there is still some market inflation for GPUs. 

That is completely normal. Some games will run at higher framerates because it is so much easier for your GPU to run. 40-60 fps in GTA 5 on a 1050ti does not sound bad at all. Its actually pretty good depending on what settings you are running at. 

You can. You would just install windows on the drive you want to be your boot drive, and then you would connect the hard drive to the sata interface at the same time. Once windows is installed and you want to install some of your games, you just select the hard drive when it asks you what location you want to install your games on. 

I wasn't sure which kind of processor was an X299. At the current price, they don't seem like a smart investment. Unless I was doing a lot of multi-threading operations instead of gaming.

Losing one of the 1080 Tis? Not really - SLi scaling is usually negligible and sometimes it's actually worse than a single card. The extra 2 cores and higher clocks of the 8700K, on the other hand, will be a significant improvement, although if you really wanted to be a megaballer you could the X299 route instead.

Why don't you sell one of you TI's and buy An 8700k? Even a single 1080 Ti can HAUL in games, and SLI scaling is awful on Pascal with modern games

I know exactly what you are talking about, as I had this exact issue. When I was first building my computer I originally went with the x52 as my aio, but as time went on I realized that was a major mistake. When I first bought the product my computer would not even boot because the pump on the x52 was broken so I thought "no problem I'll just get a replacement from Amazon." Once my next aio arrived it worked for a few days and then the pump broke again and I was seeing the exact same temps at idle that you were. At this point, I decided to try another replacement from Amazon and had the same issue. Finally I tried one more time from an electronics store thinking it might just be amazon's stock that is bad, and of course, I had the same experience. At this point, I was done and decided to go the Corsair route, and haven't had so much as a problem since. I am currently using the h115i in a push-pull configuration and have my 8700k at 5.1Ghz at 1.35v and am idling at 30 degrees Celsius. Basically, I have found that NZXT's products that aren't cases are terrible. I wanted to build my computer full NZXT with aer RGB fans, the Kraken, and a hue+; in the end, I realized nothing was working and jumped ship to corsiar. It's not perfect, but at least it works. 

You want to be using a PCI slot for a wifi card. That is the slot that is smaller than the large ones and under your CPU socket. In terms of PSU power, practically zero use. If you want a good card, I personally have had a great experience with this TP-Link one:
 
https://smile.amazon.com/TP-Link-TL-WDN4800-Wireless-network-Adapter/dp/B007GMPZ0A/ref=pd_sbs_147_8?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B007GMPZ0A&pd_rd_r=d6859686-7271-11e8-9ab7-39985758a02b&pd_rd_w=t2on0&pd_rd_wg=gXxZ6&pf_rd_i=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=5825442648805390339&pf_rd_r=K85VWBCWQEEKS3EZY98C&pf_rd_s=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=K85VWBCWQEEKS3EZY98C
 
its relatively affordable and offers good and stable performance