Squidge

Thank you all. Going to mark as solved. Loads of useful tips here! Just joined the site today and really pleased with the quality of responses. Best wishes!

@Haro thank you, that's very helpful. I was simply browsing through various motherboards, and looking at various price points and trying to weigh up what was useful or not - and well, it got very complicated very quickly. I suppose if I'm looking at pure value - i may end up going with something like the https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/TUF-GAMING-X570-PLUS-WI-FI/ What initially drew me to the B550 Taichi, is (honestly) - it looks gorgeous; then reading up about it, it seemed to have a lot of positives, like its great sound, wifi, power draw etc... where I am it is currently about £100 more than the TUF Gaming x570 - which initially sounds a lot, but I don't imagine I'll be upgrading again for 5-6 years, unless my work leads me to needing something more powerful - at which point I'll be able to justify it anyway. I record and edit using an external interface, so I suppose sound isn't a huge factor. ...but it's shiny.

@boggy77 thank you, I agree about the overkill cooler. Great, thank you for the clarification there. I think for what I need, b550 seems absolutly fine! @mrdoubtfull thank you, I'm glad you've gone through this research and have first hand knowledge - very helpful @mariushm totally agree with overkill cooler, just through it on pc-partspicker whilst I'm figuring out the main components (gives me an overall idea on maximum cost - before I start re-fining etc) I will certainly look into the Gigabyte B550 vision D, I imagine pcie layout is going to be really important with any 30 series GPU.

I'm having difficulty choosing a motherboard for an build I'm planning. Haven't made any final choices but I'll copy paste my pcpartpicker list at the bottom. I'm basically waiting for new Ryzen to come out and see how it will affect prices of other cpu's before I make a final decision. I'm trying to find a vain balance between performance, efficiency and aesthetics. In the past I mostly used my PC for gaming, however lately video and audio editing has become much more common, and hoping it to be the primary use. And yes I know a 3090 is overkill, but it's down there as a pipe dream. I really like the look of the ASrock Taichi B550, and I'm mainly worrying about how much I lose out by not going with the X570. If I do end up sticking with intel, I'll most likely be on the Z490. I'm sure there are better motherboards out there, but I just need to know how much I'm injuring the potential of a build by going with a certain choice. So can anyone advise on where to go with this? My mock-up build: PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price CPU AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8 GHz 12-Core Processor £397.49 @ Amazon UK CPU Cooler NZXT KRAKEN Z73 73.11 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler £248.78 @ More Computers Motherboard ASRock B550 Taichi ATX AM4 Motherboard £298.98 @ Amazon UK Memory Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory £167.52 @ Newegg UK Storage Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive £171.46 @ Scan.co.uk Video Card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB Founders Edition Video Card Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 ATX Full Tower Case £115.99 @ AWD-IT Power Supply Fractal Design Ion+ 860 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply £130.47 @ Scan.co.uk Monitor Acer VG270U Pbmiipx 27.0" 2560x1440 144 Hz Monitor £289.00 @ Currys PC World Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts Total £1819.69 Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-10-20 12:05 BST+0100