Probably going to be ordering a new PC very, very soon, and while I'm happy to finally upgrade, I really don't like the current market situation:

• GPUs: Not much to say here. It's a bad choice one way or another.
• CPUs: A bit unclear whether this is a good moment to get a new one. At least the next gen sounds like it's going to be a refresh for both AMD and Intel so nothing significantly different in a while, but pricing is a bit bad: I want to future-proof my PC as well as possibly while still not investing too much, so it sounds like Ryzen 5 7700 it is... which is terrible value. If it didn't sound like Cities: Skylines 2 was pretty CPU-heavy, I'd probably get a 7600 instead and consider upgrading later if necessary.
• motherboards/cases: USB-C and PCI-E 5.0 are kind of coming, and things are moving on this front. AM5 is terribly expensive, but I need it for future upgrade potential. USB 3.2 support in cases is also relatively rare.
• SSDs: PCI-E 4.0 sounds fine, but with PCI-E 5.0 coming along, I'm not confident my timing is great. At least prices don't seem too terrible (although I'm not sure if the situation is actually good, compared to historical prices).

Anyway, thinking of something like this:

• AMD Ryzen 5 7700: Future-proofing, like I said. Terrible value, and I'm not quite willing to invest in a 7700X3D. An Intel Core i5-13600 seems like something that would be more suitable for my needs, but I'm kind of interested in power efficiency, and I'm more confident in AM5's longevity.
• GeForce RTX 4060: Again terrible value, but should do at 1080p, which is what I'll be using. I'll still have to check whether it's actually usable for ray tracing at 1080p and with DLSS, but I'm expecting it to kind of be. I'm betting for DLSS 3 to be worth more than the extra raw power I could get with the RTX 3000 series, but that's a bit of a gamble for sure (+ RTX 3000 availability seems a bit poor here at the moment). For me, it probably makes more sense to get an RTX 4060 and upgrade to something like an RTX 6060 whenever it comes out than getting a more expensive GPU now (but again a bit of a gamble).
• Asus TUF Gaming B650-Plus WiFi or ASRock B650 PG Lightning or ASRock B650 Pro RS: A bit of a tough choice. Sounds like ASRock might be faster at booting, but dunno. It's really hard to find any usable data on the ASRock boards.
• a bunch of whatever for the rest (been looking into these carefully but not really interesting enough to write here, aside from complaining about poor USB-C and USB 3.2 support in cases + I absolutely hate how everything has a window these days)

CPU: If you buy it while it's on sale + with Starfield, it could be a pretty good deal.

GPU: Now you know that I am the type of person that loves Nvidia's technology and the features they bring to the table. But I'd seriously reconsider getting a 4060 because DLSS 3 adds to the vram requirement of games and with 8GB of vram plus the capabilities of the 4060, you really won't have a good time imo. 4060 really is a 1080p card and DLSS3 doesn't look very good when rendering at that low of a resolution. I'd highly consider either a 6700XT or a 3060 12GB. 6700XT would be my go to even if you miss out on DLSS because it has both Raster and Vram to run modern games at pretty good frame rates. You can also choose 3060 if you want Nvidia's features like Reflex and it's discounted a good amount but 6700XT will be a lot faster than it.

Motherboard: Between those 3, I'd get Asus and enable "Memory Context Restore" and it will fix any boot time issues. Since you want to keep it a long time and upgrade in the future by the sounds of it, I'd rather get the goodies the Asus one provides.

CPU's aren't to badly priced at the moment. The 7000 series is roughly inline with the 5000 series in terms of pricing.

The extra massive costs was always due to Motherboards and Ram sadly.

Yeah, Starfield is definitely sweetening the deal for me. I haven't been terrible excited for it due to its theme, but it's Bethesda, so I'm expecting the game to suck me right in anyway. Not sure if there are going to be any sales any time soon, and I kind of want a new PC before Cities: Skylines 2 comes up, which doesn't help (there go the Black Friday deals).

Thanks for the advise on the GPU! I'll look into this a bit more, although I suspect an RTX 4060 won't be too bad for my needs. I'm not too fond of the other suggestions though: an RTX 3060 isn't that much cheaper here (unless buying used, where availability is so-so, but I might go for it anyway if I find a good deal), and the RX 6700 XT might end up costing too much to justify the extra cost (the XFX RX 6700 XT is the only one with a decent price at the moment, but it has only 10 GB of VRAM + I'll definitely miss out on any benefits DLSS might have, which I'm still expecting to be some). Really poor situation though.

What kinds of goodies might you be talking about with regard to Asus? As far as I can see, all three seem to have quite similar specs (aside from WiFi, which I won't be using), but I might be able to save a bit by getting an ASRock one (PG Lightning). I suppose Asus might have support for longer, but that's just speculation until I learn otherwise.

And yea, the goodies are mainly minor like better audio since Asus has shielding and such so you won't get any weird interference or pop outs and Asus one has Wifi 6 + Bluetooth so you can easily connect controllers and you get secondary SSD heatsinks. But Asrock does have more USB ports so it is a bit of a trade off depending on what you value more. But if you don't value the extra stuff, then yea you can try to go with Asrock and see how it goes. Especially if you can use the savings to get a better GPU experience.

I don't really think CPUs in general are priced badly, it's just the 7700 whose pricing I'm not fond of. It's quite far from the 7600 and relatively close to the 7800X3D in terms of price, and I feel like it should be a bit closer to the 7600 (250 € vs. 360 € vs. 435 € or so). It's quite expensive to get an 8-core CPU or better here, which is what I'd like for maximal future-proofing, if you care about power efficiency at the moment.

Yeah, Starfield is definitely sweetening the deal for me. I haven't been terrible excited for it due to its theme, but it's Bethesda, so I'm expecting the game to suck me right in anyway. Not sure if there are going to be any sales any time soon, and I kind of want a new PC before Cities: Skylines 2 comes up, which doesn't help (there go the Black Friday deals).

Thanks for the advise on the GPU! I'll look into this a bit more, although I suspect an RTX 4060 won't be too bad for my needs. I'm not too fond of the other suggestions though: an RTX 3060 isn't that much cheaper here (unless buying used, where availability is so-so, but I might go for it anyway if I find a good deal), and the RX 6700 XT might end up costing too much to justify the extra cost (the XFX RX 6700 XT is the only one with a decent price at the moment, but it has only 10 GB of VRAM + I'll definitely miss out on any benefits DLSS might have, which I'm still expecting to be some). Really poor situation though.

What kinds of goodies might you be talking about with regard to Asus? As far as I can see, all three seem to have quite similar specs (aside from WiFi, which I won't be using), but I might be able to save a bit by getting an ASRock one (PG Lightning). I suppose Asus might have support for longer, but that's just speculation until I learn otherwise.