I've been thinking of upgrading to either a 12700KF or 12600KF, and reusing my DDR4 and 1TB Gen3 SSD. From all the benchmarks I've seen, it just doesn't seem worth it to upgrade those components.
This test shows essentially negligible performance gains for games between 3200 DDR4 and 6000 DDR5. I'd rather save the money and put it towards better cooling and a new case.
That's what I ended up doing. I balked a bit when I started tallying up the cost with DDR5 included. I mean... it's
just another $300 for 32GB, but given higher motherboard costs and the potential need for a new cooler, it was beginning to add up a bit more than I'd like. Once I heard that DDR4 performed just as well as DDR5, which shouldn't have been a huge surprise, I decided to look into DDR4 boards. I ended up going with
ASUS's ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming WiFi D4. It was a little more than I wanted to spend on a board if I wasn't going to get 10Gbps Ethernet built in (it was $350), but I wanted one that had enough USB ports, and I like how ASUS allows for LGA-15xx/1200 coolers.
Although, now that I look at it again.... I might've made a minor error in my choice. I still use S/PDIF for connecting to my Logitech speakers, and it looks like I missed that this board does
not have an optical out for the audio! Yikes! I could use the cables instead, but the last time I tried using Line Out on the back and Headphones on the front, it would treat them as one output device. So, that meant I'd have to ensure my speakers were turned off if I didn't want to use them. It's not a huge deal, I guess, but I like the manual switching as it's a very deliberate choice in audio output. Also, I have a 10Gbps Ethernet card lying around, which means I'll get to use an Intel-based chip instead of the typical Marvel/Aquantia NIC/PHYs.