thats why its a DIY

Fine for what exactly?

For just gaming, a 10600K would be amply enough. The difference is measurable, but within just a couple frames.

For productivity, a 3900X is much better and cheaper at the same time yet not much slower in gaming. And you could upgrade to Zen 3 later this year, which most likely will finally also take Intel's gaming crown away.

I know you don't want to wait, but with Ampere, Big Navi and Zen 3 practically just around the corner, I'd say now is a pretty bad moment to start a new build.

Isn't it always a bad moment to build?

I'm building a 100% Gaming PC that will not be used for anything but gaming. It won't even run any applications in the background. So what I need most over everything is strong single core performance with high clocks for high fps. The 10900k is the best option for that there is. It has the most reserves, because those single digit percentages of performance gain will get bigger over the years if I'd opt for something less. The only reason to not pick it is if I want to save some money or if PCIe3 presents a serious bottleneck in the next 3 years.

I would like to buy AMD over Intel because I expect Zen 3 to be on par with the 10900k for my use case but I'm not sure if it's actually worth the wait. Why wait just to have something that does the same thing?

Would be true if you could upgrade the GPU. But if RTX 2060 is the limit for PCIe 3 x8, then a 2080ti is the limit for x16. Ampere will need PCIe 4 to get it's power to the ground, something NVidia has already pointed at.

So if you can't upgrade the GPU to make use of the extra power, then you can just as well settle for a 10600K. Or go AMD to be able to use PCIe 4 and thus full power on the next gen GPUs.

Nvidia officially confirmed the 12 pin connector (and compatibility with 8 pins with a included adapter)

Depends on the card you are getting. Currently with the 5700XT which is the only PCIe 4.0 card on the market, some games do show higher fps even if it is like 5fps going from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0. But the 2080Ti also shows that there's a massive difference in fps for some games going from PCIe 3.0 16x to 8x which could be the case with 3090 since with PCIe 4.0, 8x will be the speed of PCIe 3.0's 16x.

Personally I'd wait for PCIe scaling benchmarks or wait for Zen 3 entirely as it's coming out soon and could give you the best of both worlds.

I think the judges aren't in for that yet. The things I've read is that a 2080ti barely uses 8x. I will certainly wait for Ampere benchmarks before I make a decision on that.

Here is a nice test

https://www.igorslab.de/en/pcie-4-0-and-pcie-3-0-different-between-x8-andx16-with-the-fast-fastest-cards-where-the-bottle-neck-begins/

Overall there is no noticeable difference between PCIe 3 x8 and x16 on the highest end GPUs with heavy loads. Also the required bandwidth seems to go down with higher resolution, that's probably because of the lower fps.

Yeah, now it's not a good time to go for white components.

Your best bets would be mobos with white/silver parts, like the ASRock Pro4 (Z490, X570) or Steel Legend (Z490, X570) series or the Gigabyte Vision G. And well, you're not good for white GPUs either, unless you wait some months for the Galax Hall of Fame cards.

Then again, none of them are Asus, so would you really consider any of them?

Also, I'm affraid that, if you want to make a good purchase, you'll have to wait until we get not just reviews of the new cards, but also their scaling with different CPUs and over PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0.

It sucks to be you.

Also got a 2 second glimpse of their up coming cooler at 8:10! Looks like the leaks were correct.

If Zen 3 is actually coming out soon everything's fine. But even in that video you can see the differences in 4k are negligible. My next rig will be 4k only. And if I throw RT in the mix there probably won't be any bandwidth bottleneck either. I just don't want to run into CPU bottlenecks ever again.