Build is done and went well. Pretty straightforward.

I put the stock cooler on, but the plan is to bump the Ryzen to 3.8 or 3.9 Ghz, and this cooler (Stealth) isn't going to cut it. Or I won't take the chance anyway.

BIOS defaults to smart fan settings, which is super quiet at idle. But that's just about 800 RPM. I turned that off and the CPU fan runs at 1900+ RPM. This dropped idle temps from 38C to 33C @ 23C ambient room temp.

Performance is zippy enough. My benchmarking days are long behind me. Boot time is 15 seconds, but all new builds boot fast. The only game I installed so far is Elite Dangerous and it runs as well as before. Maybe better, but if so I can't tell.

Two things jumped out at me in Elite. One is I see more detail. This could be down to settings, though I think it's set up the same. Things like the galaxy map are more crisp and detailed. Target ships show more detail, especially lighting. Again, perhaps down to a setting, but could be the 1660 Ti.

The other thing is sound. I've been using on-board sound for 20 years now. Sound quality is markedly superior to my dead box which used an Asus Z170 board.

The only trouble I am running in to is after installing Elite with no issues to the mechanical storage drive, I now get a Steam disk write error when trying to install a second game. Could be a Steam issue, could be a drive issue. Tried a few standard fixes but nothing is working. It's a Barracuda, I know, but I got a good deal on it.

Aside from that problem, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Total cost was about US$900. Build took me 3 hours and it booted first try.