GiGrannis

Is the cooler which ships with the 2600X powerful enough to keep temps low (<75°C) while overclocking it? If not, what is a cheap alternative which gets the job done?

i5 8400 is what I would buy from eighth gen. If i plan to game/mine to make some money back, is there a better chip for the same price point ($200)?

If I am building a gaming machine, is there any reason to choose a newer i5 over an older i7 with higher clock speeds? I am new to PC building, so this may be a very stupid question. What about a newer i5 versus an older i5k?

I am mining more as a hobby than anything else. I have invested in crypto since 2015, and think it is here to stay. The bubble didn't burst the same way others did; crypto is still worth a lot, and people still get rich on it. The bubble was caused by people who understand neither the economics nor math and computer science underlying crypto investing speculatively. Now that they have been weeded out, crypto is lucrative. Especially newer generation coins like Tron, which acts like infrastructure for dApps. Either way, I will have a sweet rig, and mining crypto will earn me back some money on it.

SSDs are really expensive. Once I make enough mining I email get an SSD for booting the OS.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HJ2dxG

I am trying to build a mining/VR rig, but am limited to a 1200 dollar budget, not including OS. If the motherboard I have chosen has 2 PCI E 16 lanes, is it necessarily SLI compatible, in case I want to add another GPU down the road, or should I just buy a more expensive mobo and save money elsewhere?