That's a really good recommendation Wingy, thanks. You have a great card.

My solution to my issues was driven by the fact I don't want to spend much money. When I built the dead box in Jan '17 I went higher end.. Not cutting edge, but at the time the 1070 was right up there, and the Skylake was pretty recent as well. Of course, one pays a premium the closer to the top you go. My M.O. was always to research the cutting edge, then drop a level or two lol. Yesterdays best thing ya know. I felt like it was the way to get the best price/performance ratio.

So today I completely threw that out the window and ordered the parts I need for a budget box

I would have loved to go with a 2060, and I can always add one in the future. For this build it'll be a 1660 Ti. This card is marginally better than the 1070 (which by the way may NOT be dead) The upshot is I should see similar or slightly better graphics performance with a lower power draw.

In order to keep the price down I skimped on basically everything. I plan to use this one until I get around to tearing down the Red Dead Contraption. I'll then turn that in to an up to date box and give the budget one to my son, who is 9 and looking to become a PC gamer. The parts I am getting will enable me to more easily troubleshoot the dead one too.

The biggest leap of faith I made was on the mainboard and CPU. I haven't used AMD since an Athlon around 15 years ago. I've been Intel/nVidia ever since. This box will use a Ryzen 2600 and a MSI B450 main board. I even skimped on the power supply, which I never do and went with a Seasonic 500watt. Maybe the truth is that I always go overboard on power supplies. 500 should be plenty. Normally I'd go 750 for probably no good reason at all.

16 gigs of RAM, 500 GB SSD/2 TB mechanical, air cooled. SSDs are so cheap now.

If the Ryzen is more or less on par with the 6700K I'll be happy enough. It benches better anyway. This box will be good enough for everything I play now, but lacks future proofing. For the money I can live with it.