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sorry, I missed that it was for competitive games- that does change things somewhat. is this for 1080p or 1440p? for esports type games you could also look into trying to find a 7600X3D- they are oddly priced high right now on amazon but you should be able to find one for $200. it has only 6 cores but the heap of 3D cache is beneficial to high-refresh rate gaming including helping improve 1% lows. the 9070 XT is approximately 20-30% faster than the 5070 depending on the game and benchmark you are looking at, but it is effectively a tier above the 5070, since it performs on par with a 5070 Ti. if you want to stick with Nvidia and a 5070 (which is fine, don't let people tell you otherwise) this model is the exact same in black for $599. it's up to you in the end but I would skip the 5050 and 5060 entirely in 2026 unless you are SEVERELY budget constrained, they only have 8GB of VRAM which gets by for competitive games but will limit you in anything more demanding. the 5070 has 12GB which many people feel is still not enough, but you will likely only run into that limit running higher texture settings at 1440p. however this could be a consideration for longevity if you didn't want to upgrade for a few years. I wouldn't call AMD GPUs better or worse than Nvidia but since Nvidia technically has a larger and slightly better developed feature set (DLSS is more widely supported and arguably looks slightly better than FSR upscaling, etc.) they have a more significant price markup in the current market. the 9070 XT can typically be found for $50-80 above MSRP while you will be paying at minimum $100 over MSRP on the Nvidia side. that said, if you are playing competitively, FAR more games support Nvidia reflex. I generally prefer to buy Nvidia for their feature set but have been doing a lot of AMD builds lately since the value proposition is better. for motherboards- the Asus B650E-I is on newegg for $180 right now and having had several they're good, especially for that price. if you look online you will see that many of them suffer from coil whine noise at idle (posts will say newer batches have corrected this, but it has not- I have several from 2026 that still do it) if that bothers you. they should have an updated BIOS from the factory by now to support Ryzen 9000 CPUs out of the box, but if not, it's an easy process since it has a BIOS flashback option (so you can update its BIOS without a CPU installed). cooling should be fine with the IS-55 as long as it's the right size for your layout. you can replace the slim fan that it comes with and your case fan if you want to maximize performance (Silverstone air slimmer 120 is a good off-the-shelf option but is a bit expensive). arctic fans are cheap and perform well but they are notorious for having shoddy qc, e.g. if you buy a 5 pack usually 1 or 2 of them will have noisy bearings