The motherboard is an MSI x470 Gaming Plus, and has both a one slot that is an M.2 and one slot that is a M.2/SATA hybrid that can accept either one….

The Intel 660p is a M.2 SSD, with supposedly good transfer speed and is at a cheap price around (I think newegg has them for $88 now) …They are good, if it works. Apparently, the reviews from others were less than stellar about reliability. Some ran into the same problem I had. Some had the SSD fail after a few weeks/month of use… I decided to send it back and got a different brand: ADATA XPG, with 3500MB/s and it worked right off the bat. I couldn’t even see the intel SSD in the BIOS setup.

MSI has a pretty good compatibility matrix on their support site. I was able to get a decently priced 16gb DDR4 to run at 3200 with very little effort.

I haven’t tried to overclock things massively yet. I don’t think there is much headroom for overclocking the 2700x, especially using the stock cooler.. And I don’t want to spend the money on more expensive cooling, which would defeat the purpose of having a low cost system… Slightly over half of the cost was in the cpu and motherboard… The rest of the cost was on storage/gpu/powersupply/case/memory…If I have to ditch those for the new x570 board and a 3700x or 3950x, the waste is about $360 (I got the x470 board at a steal price).. everything else should transfer over…When pcie4 drives are available at a cheaper cost, that certainly would be tempting to add another drive.