goldenf

It is still a QC though and some games don't play well with them. 

The B450 Tomahawk Max is but personally would look for the 550 boards and how they're priced as they will support 4000 chips without jumping through several hoops which you might not want to do if you're just starting out. 
 
What resolution are you looking at? For me I'd look at the R5 3600 with a 5700XT which should be around the same as a 2070S. Few percent slower but I think is still cheaper. 

Yes - I tried that first while it was all installed in the case, and then tried installing the GPU again for good measure when I assembled it outside the case - same result

This is excellent info, thanks.

I'm in South Africa. Those are definitely the cheapest 2TB drives I have seen. They're both at 3700 ZAR (190 EUR) but I suspect there may be a pricing error on the site. If that is the case then I'll just get the Pilot-E for 5150 ZAR (263 EUR) with an EK heatsink, since the the BX500 is barely any cheaper at 4700 ZAR (240 EUR).

I know that the Micron 1300 is a decent drive and will do fine.
Haven't heard or read much about the Barracuda. That's something you'd need to look into yourself. There are probably plenty of reviews.
 
I find it interesting that those two drives are the cheapest where you live.
Where I live, Germany, they are quite expensive. Are you sure there aren't any cheaper ones?
 
Here the 1300 costs around 350€, while I can get similar drives for less than 250€.
 
Btw. In general it's important that the SSD that you're going to buy has at least some form of cache on board. The BX500 for example doesn't have any cache and is a drive you should avoid.

Really depends on the price, your need for that much storage, where you're buying it and how you're paying for it.
 
I wouldn't buy such an expensive piece of hardware from someone without any sort of security like for example PayPal or eBay's buyer protection.
 
If you can get the guy to post this SSD on eBay for the price he wants to sell it at and then purchase it from him with PayPal - yeah, why not?
Otherwise I wouldn't do it. I was scammed before and lost 600€ because of a GTX 1080.
 
Edit: Also get yourself a copy of the S.M.A.R.T. values of the drive.

Prebuilts come with OEM keys, those are vaild for that one machine only and not transferrable.
 
The "link to account" only works with retail licenses.

Yeah I can see that, now that he's actually posted what he's got.

take a look at this video, basically getting a board thats not z490 doesn't make sense, and if u do get a z490 then the 10600k is a great gaming chip with the right memory. For budget builds the 3600 is better, the 10400 is a pointless product