My question/problem in a nutshell: Does my motherboard even have the capacity to upgrade to today's standards, or should I just basically start completely fresh and scrap all my current stuff and/or use it for LAN parties or something as an extra PC for a friend?

CURRENT SPECS

Motherboard: MSi Z370 SLI Plus.

• Three X16-PCIe 3.0 lanes

• Two X1-PCIe 3.0 lanes

• Six SATAIII lanes

• No bluetooth capability (outside of a USB connector that connects to it's own device with bluetooth, obviously)

• The other specs aren't that important to me, any current motherboard will have plenty of USB slots, etc.

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz

RAM: 16 GB (unsure if DDR4 or DDR3).

HDD/SSD: Two SSD drives (160 GB 1 TB after-market), 1 HDD (1 TB).

Cooling System/Tower/Other things: Unsure, I can look them up if they're relevant, I'm not sure exactly what else you'd need to know. Here is a picture of the tower cooling all the stuff inside if it helps.

Uses: Primarily for gaming.

Issues/Looking to upgrade

• My GPU is horribly out of date, I know, and is first on my list of things to upgrade.

• I feel like the motherboard is mega out of date, right? Do current motherboards even use SATAIII? Also would this motherboard still even support a 3000 or 4000 series GPU?

• Games are getting big and I am running out of space.

• The whole system runs LOUD (likely the cooling system on overdrive) when I'm running games like BG3, ARK, etc. So I'm not sure if I need a new cooling system to go with a better graphics card as well.

• Box/Tower I feel like is decently large, though it collects dust from all sides (though that might be an issue for every tower, I'm not sure). Might be contributing to the noise/heat.

• Probably need a RAM upgrade. Not sure if higher RAM takes more lanes or not.

• CPU is fine? How much difference does a new generation of CPU make over an older one, given both are i7 with roughly 3.0-3.5 GHz? These days it's mostly about the SSD, right?