Yeah, it's just man, building computers 5-10 years ago was so much easier because there were only a few options available for Audio PC's. Now, there are so many different iterations of motherboards that's it's really difficult and confusing to figure out which board is best suited for my DAW and interface.

I actually called Gigabyte and ASUS today to confirm which motherboard would work best for my needs and I ended up going with the ASUS ProArt Z490 Creator, which has Native Thunderbolt 3 ports - no add on card. The Gigabyte Z590 Vision D has Thunderbolt 4 and there aren't any backwards compatibility boxes available from TB4 to TB2.

As Pants and Fish mentioned, the other major thing to be aware of is the Lane Sharing of NVMe drives. The ASUS Creator board really only supports one NVMe drive out of the box because if you have two, it not only takes up SATA port 0, but 5 & 6 as well, while also eating up PCIe processing. So, I ended up returning the 1TB Evo 980 because I need at least six hard drives - 3 won't do it, so moving forward, I'll just purchase Thunderbolt drives.

I feel as if I know more than I really wanted to know about all of these different motherboards. Oh well, more useless knowledge to bounce around in my brain.

:-)
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Seasonic makes most of the major brand power supplies, some have multiple manufacturers with seasonic making the higher end stuff and chinese joints making the lower. Skip the BS and get a seasonic branded, modular, PSU as efficient as you can afford and go with that.
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I've only ever had corsair but recently I've heard seasonic makes most of them. Is 850w enough or should I go bigger? Planning on getting a 3080 if I ever find one
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im using a seasonic gold 850 for a 5900x, a 3090, AIO, tons of fans, RGB, 32gb ram etc..

I have done max overclocks of the 3090 and 5900x with zero issues. If you are on Ryzen of ny kind you are 100% clear, if high end/power intel, you are likely clear as well, but with less headroom.
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Oh I'm a ryzen guy currently running the 1700 haha it's why it's time for an upgrade
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Seasonic used to make a lot of PSUs for other brands. They used to make the more higher end PSUs for Corsair like their bigger TXM models but those are now made by Great Wall. I believe the only Corsair PSUs manufactured by Seasonic these days are a couple of their AX (non i) models.

XFX PSUs are all Seasonic.

Seasonic is one of the best makers you can buy from but they arent the only one. Super Flower is another really good manufacturer and they make the EVGA G2 and G3 which are 2 of the most highly rated PSUs on the market, along with all the other B/T/P 2&3 series PSUs.
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This has been an unadulterated nightmare.

Not only was the Gigabyte Z490 Vision D defective, the Samsung 980 NVMe drive is defective as well. I've had errors with Windows 10 Pro all week and had to reload the operation system 4 times. I've spent more than 10 hours on with Microsoft Support and while I thought it was "fixed" Wednesday evening, it wouldn't even boot today. And unfortunately, this is after I spent about 20 hours installing all of my necessary software.

My old drive is working on the computer (which is what I'm using right now) but it's only 250 GB, so I ordered another NVMe drive that will arrive tomorrow. I've wasted six days of my life trying to get this to work and either failure rate is higher than ever or I'm just having the worst luck of all time but either way, this has been a very, very discouraging experience.

I hope this computer, once it's finally working properly, will last me 6 years because I cannot imagine going through this process again any time soon.
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Man, I don't get it. I build I range of systems for gaming and business customers, and I've never had those kinds of issues, let alone at the same time. Do you have magnetic fingers or what? 2 bad parts at the same time? That's gotta be the worst luck mathematically possible...

Sorry, not trying to make fun.
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If / when I ever attempt to build a gaming computer myself...it's guarnateed, i'll have the same experience as Dane lol.

one of those 'whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" when I decide to do it. Guarnatee.
That's my biggest reservation about atttempting to build one myself. hell, and if Dane knows what he's doing and ran into this stuff....I'm screwed as a newbie. :-)
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Agreed. I have been building pcs for 20 years, hundreds of new builds, and havent had that many components failed combined. Almost ALWAYS if someone thinks they have a dead CPU or MOBO straight from the factory, its been user errors, may have seen 2 dead mobos total in 20 years.

I think its a combo of too many/not installed properly NVME drives for not enough PCI-E lanes, and user error.
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No worries, Dude. I've put off building a computer for a couple of years because I expected it to be a PITA but I didn't expect to be this big of a PITA. I've been building PC's since 1997 and this is the first time I've had so many defective parts.

Clearly, Gigabyte support was wrong. The initial power supply wasn't the issue at all because the CPU LED was lit after replacement. I sent back the motherboard, which I believe was the culprit all along, and the CPU, just to be certain.

The ASUS Z490 Creator 10G is working as it should, as is the replacement i9-10850k. But after initially loading Windows, I had all kinds of issues. I contacted Microsoft Support Chat and had a tech login to my computer to make changes, but they didn't take, as the same issues returned the following day. I logged back into Windows support in which the tech reinstalled Windows but I kept receiving error messages.

After reinstalling two more times, I finally received an error message related to the hardware, which Microsoft identified as the hard drive. So, I plugged in my old SSD and boom! Everything worked as expected but since that drive is only 250 GB, I ordered another Samsung NVMe 980 from Amazon, which was supposed to be delivered Saturday. I did several memory tests, including the Windows test, which took more than 2 hours, and everything came back good.

But on Saturday at 4:30, I received an email from Amazon stating that the drive wouldn't be delivered until the following Thursday, so I cancelled the order and purchased a 970 from Best Buy, which is the only NVMe I could find locally.

It's booting properly with no hang ups and no error codes, so I'm pretty sure it was just a faulty drive. Programs load so fast that I barely even see them load, which is a good sign. In the end, I received a defective motherboard and a defective NVMe drive, which wasn't really unexpected but it made it difficult to figure out what was causing the issue.

Thanks again for all of the assistance!
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:-)

Pretty much.
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The Gigabyte Z490 Vision D that I received had the Red LED light on the minute I started the computer. It never even made it to the BIOS. The Gigabyte customer service person said it was a bad power supply, so I returned the Thermaltake 850 watt and replaced it with a Corsair, which resulted in the same exact issue. Gigabyte gave me the choice of having it repaired under warranty, which would take a few weeks or return to Amazon, so I returned it.

Since the CPU light was lit with both power supplies and nothing the tech person said helped, I decided to return the CPU, just in case that was the actual problem. The ASUS motherboard and all of its ports are working properly, so it was definitely the motherboard, IMO. That makes three defective motherboards in the past 9 years alone.

As for the hard drive, I was shocked as well. It was seated properly and seemed to be okay but once Windows was loaded, there were multiple errors, so I contacted Microsoft Chat support. The tech reinstalled Windows twice, once from the internet and once from an ISO file and I thought the issue was solved but the next day, I received the same errors. Another tech reinstalled it from the Cloud but that didn't fix it either and I was advised to wipe the drive and fully reinstall, which meant that I would need to spend about 20 hours downloading and reinstalling all of my software again. Reluctantly, I followed their advice, only to have the same exact issues again. Finally, on Friday, a Microsoft tech saw a new error code and indicated that it was related to the hard drive, which led to that replacement.

I've been building since 1997 and while I've had defective motherboards in the past, I've only had a few hard drives fail or were defective out of the box, all of which were Seagate's back in the late 90's and early 2000's. I had a couple of old WD's fail after more than 8 years of daily use but that's to be expected. But this is definitely the first SSD that I've had fail out of the 8 or 9 I've installed in my computer and computers throughout the home.

I set aside 7 days to build and load software, which I thought was more than enough but it's taken damn near 3 weeks to get this box right. Hopefully, it'll last at least 5 years because after this experience, I'm in no hurry to do this again.
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Augh. I'm gonna buy a pre-built.

Any recommendations for a moderate gaming laptop?
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