Mayclore

Then most X470 boards are going to be overkill. Even the ROG Strix X370-F Gaming I have my Ryzen 5 1600X in is probably overkill. I mean, the reasons why you'd want any of the X470 boards in this price bracket are as varied as the boards themselves. Do you want an integrated I/O shield? Ridiculous power delivery if you move to an eight-core? Addressable RGB headers? How many LEDs do you want, a number which varies from zero to an integer best described as "Gigabyte's design engineers drank too much Red Bull again"? These are questions only you can answer, but there aren't really any bad boards in this price stratum.

We'll see. It feels like we're finally headed toward a software ecosystem where everything wants as many cores as you can supply. 7nm Zen 2, if they can get a whole bunch of cores on Socket AM5 (or whatever they're gonna call it) is going to be a very interesting prospect indeed.

This is absolutely correct. The biggest noticeable difference comes from moving to an SSD from a hard drive, not from SATA SSD to NVMe. I'd take the money you'd spend on a 500GB NVMe drive and buy a fat 1 TB SATA SSD instead. That's the path I chose.

Oh, man, where to start. There are a number of possibilities here. CPU architecture design and process node quality are two places to start; Intel's 14nm is a highly mature process at this point, while Zen was AMD's first crack at it and Zen+ is their first crack at 12nm. As for node quality, well, Intel owns the fabs that make its chips, like AMD used to. AMD now contracts out its fabrication to GlobalFoundries and Samsung, companies which may not have the same fabrication quality as Intel's fabs do. There's a reason Intel dumps so much dolla-dolla into those fabs. It's also probably a function of the way the architectures work. Zen is a multi-core module design connected via the Infinity Fabric, while Coffee Lake is just a monolithic CPU die like we're all used to.

There is absolutely no reason to feel compelled to have a brand-matched build unless you're super picky about your RGB lighting matching up exactly. Select parts that have the features you want at the price you're willing to pay (while being mindful of how well they review, of course). That's all that matters.