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JEMC said:

My biggest fear, and I want to stress out that it's a personal fear and nothing more, is that in a couple of gens, both AMD and Nvidia will have switched to Gen 5 while keeping the same designs as today, and that means limiting their xx60 and x600 cards to x8 Gen lanes. That won't be a problem if both ends are Gen5, but if your motherboard is limited to Gen4, then you'll be limiting the bandwidht of your GPU below that AMD and Nvidia designed the cards for.

And don't get me wrong, I know it won't make much of a difference. We've seen how even a 4090 doesn't lose much when limited to x8 PCIe 4.0 lanes and, given that happened this gen, I'm not sure the xx60/x600 cards will come close to its performance even after two gens.

That's my concern as well, but the RTX 4090 thing is what really gives me confidence that there shouldn't be any issues with non-top-tier GPUs even in at least a few years. They could technically change up things significantly and design new GPUs to heavily utilize PCIe 5.0, but it seems fairly radical to me, so it seems fairly safe to bet against it happening.

JEMC said:

Regarding the case, it probably costs more than what you're willing to spend, but the be quiet! Silent Base 802 (Techpowerup review here) may tick all your boxes.

Seems pretty decent, and if I was willing to add one more retailer to the mix (looks like I'll be going for two already because of availability), the price might actually be acceptable. Not a fan of the look personally though, and for a relatively expensive case, the lack of USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 seems curious (I think all the motherboard I've been considering have support for at least one such connection).