ohaple

Thanks for the input. I will dig into that board and comparable

May be good advice, but doesn't sound terribly constructive re the board. What board would you recommend for an R5 3600? Its a 30% more expensive processor, but does appear to get more than 30% performance gains, so it is the type of suggestion I was looking for, thank you.

Good tip on the Intel M.2, I agree that is probably the better value. I don't have experience with either of those cards, but they look pretty interchangeable as far as benchmarks go. I will keep my eye on both. Thanks for the upgradability tip re Intel.

I built a mid-tier budget oriented system back in 2015 for 1080p gaming, editing, and streaming. Here are the components: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Cz7M8M This PC is getting fairly dated and works fine on 1080p gaming, but I would like to set myself up to be able to mess with VR in the next 6 months or so. I have pretty much quit streaming and editing, so gaming is the most demanding thing this system will see. I would like to upgrade components and take advantage of the winter sales to set up some price alerts so I can do this as cheap as possible. My monitor has really outpaced my pc (Dell UltraSharp 38" U3818DW) due to some fortuitous circumstances. It is more of a productivity-oriented display, but is very nice to use. For all components I am looking for bang for buck, not just the best performing that I could afford. My budget is really nebulous right now. I am looking for parts of similar price to listed below, but no hard cap. The components I am prioritizing are: New CPU and MB. When I have dealt with CPUs in the past Intel has been king. I understand AMD has surpassed especially in the budget market. Still, being more familiar with Intel I am looking at an i5-9400F. Anyone have other suggestions in the $100-250 price point? What about microATX boards that have IO for VR and M.2 drive support? I was looking at the ASrock B360M Pro4. Larger M.2 drive. 120gb SSD was fine back then, but games are so large now that I really need something bigger. Would prefer not to off-load to a large HDD. Thinking Samsung 970 Evo. New GPU. Thinking RTX 2060 Super (Founders is listed in PCPP, but I am open to other manufacturers and models). New/more RAM: Thinking 2x 8gb sticks. Here are the parts I discussed above: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/NTm2Rk I would love to hear about any good bang-for-buck parts that I haven't listed or considered. Any manufacturers that have recurring deep discounts this time or year to watch for? I plan to do this over the next 2-5 months.