Thats a solid PC. I’m cheap though.
I would drop the 3950 to a 3900 and save myself 300 bucks. I dont think the little bit of extra performance justifies almost double the price.
I would drop the 980 pro to a 970 pro because the transfer rate isnt going to improve performance by a noticeable amount.
I would also just go with a evga 3080 founders edition knocking off anther 150.
I’ll put this thing through it’s paces. I do 3D models as a hobby, but I’m bad at it, so I use a lot of system resources unnecessarily in my unity scenes.
The theme for this was using the pcie 4.0 stuff. I could absolutely drop back a bit on performance and save a few hundred bucks, but where’sthe fun in that? I have a dedicated PC fund, so I do a new build every WoW expansion based on whatever the new hotness is.
My only worry, at the moment, is that I might end up having to buy a card off eBay if NVidia doesn’t move to resolve all the launch issues quickly enough. October 26 doth approach.
He could also save money on the PSU. Nothing in that system requires 1200w psu.
Also search Reddit there’s issues with the new nvidia cards crashing midgame and it may be because of specific hardware components which certain manufacturers used vs others. Asus tuf series appear to be fine along with evga.
Investigations still going on.
Yeah, ive been trying to get a 3080 since they released. However, AMD is coming out with a new card soon as well, i might just wait til AMD releases the new card to see how they stack up.
Yeah, that’s one of the things I meant about launch issues. There is a lot of speculation going on, but no one knows for sure, because no configuration fails 100% of the time. Hopefully inside the next 2 weeks, we’ll know what the culprit is. Otherwise I’m gonna have to roll the dice.
This is super important info.
If it’s an older board it likely uses an m.2 sata interface, but the faster nvme drives won’t work on it. Also the sata interface drives won’t work in an nvme slot so if you upgrade your mobo you would probably need to replace the m.2 sata drive immediately.
If you get a 2.5" SSD it will work with any standard sata connection, which is universally supported, since cd/dvd drives still use them.
Yeah, i thought about it but an evga 750 is close in price to that anyway.
Thats why i said i would go with the founders edition 
The fact that nothing is going to tax either and the price difference means I would pick the cheaper more stable version every time. But like I said AMDs new card might give the 3080 a run for its money and it will be cheaper. The only issue is the AMD cards have been known to run real hot.
If he didn’t get warp drives installed, he’ll never make it through the wormhole anyway. 
I added an m.2 ssd to an old MSI Z97S SLI PLUS. It was worth it, even more so when a Crucial m.2 went on sale. The M.2 card took over one of the SATA ports though.