Hello everyone. I'm looking to build my first PC. Had one built for me years ago but that never felt like mine, if that makes sense. Been laptop gaming for the past few years because of school but I'd rather build a tower now. Looking to put a rig together to play AAA games, and then play those games modded. Looking for things like Cyberpunk, RDR2 and the new Battlefield when it drops to name a couple. With my last PC whenever a new game came out I almost always had to downgrade the settings to medium, so I wanted to put together something that can run settings at Higher end settings.

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Not counting the GPU I'd like to keep the rig around $1,300. I feel like I can save up for a bit for the GPU, the issue with that one is more availability and I don't know which one to go with. I plan to get that last anyways. I'm in the US, and thankfully in DC. So I have like 3 Microcenters around. The overall budget isn't too big of an issue. I plan to get this over the coming months and outside of the GPU everything seems very reasonable. So im in no rush nor will I buy all at once. Thinking of having it built around November/December. Looking to get opinions outside of my immediate friend group before I start purchasing pieces.

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https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2f2sTJ

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Questions

1) Is there a list of trusted retailers? If Microcenter doesn't carry something are there specific places I should go or rather avoid?

2) How is Amazon for pc related purchases? I play MTG and Amazon has recently been a little sketchy so should I avoid it?

3) Pcpartpicker has a warning that the BIOS for the motherboard may need to be updated. How will I know if it needs to be? And just how easy/difficult will that be for someone who never put together a pc before?

4) I put both HDD and an SSD in the part picker at the suggestion of a friend. Not entirely sure how that works tho. I put windows on say the SSD so the PC boots through that, then all the games on the HDD?

5) I'm still new to building this so I don't entirely understand the GPU. I get the low supply and crypto thing but I don't really understand the performance difference in say a 3060 vs 3070. I'm getting very mixed information from my immediate friend group and I don't understand all of what i read when looking up comparisons. So question, for what I want to do is the 60 or 70 better? I don't mind waiting for a deal. Or would something else entirely be better? Like I said, I've been getting very mixed information so any advice here is welcomed.

Sorry about any formatting errors