Which no one really needs... Today. B550 is an easy assured upgrade path to Zen 3, and a year or two down the line, we might be seeing GPUs that take advantage of PCIe 4.0. B450 will support Zen 3, too, but only with a one-way beta BIOS update. That's not exactly a recommended path; it's just a value add for existing B450 board owners. If this was someone with $200 in their pocket looking for a CPU and board upgrade, or wanting to do a $500 budget build, sure, B450 is the way to go. But, here, the OP has $1000 for upgrades burning a hole in their pocket, so recommending B450 is just stupid. Full stop.
For motherboard, I definitely wouldn't go MSI, Asus is usually feature rich but poor in after sale support. AsRock is hit and miss, but Gigabyte has put out some really good boards as of late. I can't recall model numbers, but Hardware Unboxed has really good breakdown videos for the Z490 platform, I'd go check them out. They should have a "best Z490" motherboard video. For cooling I'd go Noctua. Scythe also makes some nice coolers, if you can't stand the Noctua brown.
You mentioned the 10700k in another post, and if you do a lot of core intensive stuff that might be worth the extra money; I don't, so I've never looked into the differences for that kind of work. A lot of people here will try and shove AMD down your throat because its better value, but that doesn't mean it performs better. It performs better per dollar, but if you're looking for utmost performance, Intel may very well be the road to go down. I'd definitely look into it more before taking the forums advice. They've been riding AMDs dick for a while.
Why would he have to downgrade his GPU? The GPU isn't part of the $1,000 budget.
I'd go with 32GB if you have the budget regardless of the other things you do, I don't even do that much on my PC that's intensive and I run into the top end of my 16GB; and that's just a bunch of tabs, some office programs, and a game running.
I'd say spending more than you need to is dumb; B550 gives you nothing in return for the added cost other than PCIe 4.0, which no one really needs.
I wouldn't get an AMD card. He wants ray tracing, and frankly their drivers are abysmal.
Why? When you can get a board that has it built in. B450 is fine, if you're just looking to save a little cash, but if you have the funds, there's zero reason to choose it.
jgambar reacted to Chris Pratt in $1000 to uggrade my PC
