You will have to look at the second hand market for sure, but you can probably get a decent 1080p 80-100fps medium/high build.

Something like (or equivalent):

Ryzen 5 3600

RX 6600

16GB DDR4

1TB SSD (probably not NVMe)

Whatever case

Whatever monitor, even if only 60Hz, for now

Whatever MoBo

Tier A PSU from the Cultists Network PSU tier list

You can most likely get everything used if you buy from a second hand shop that has a form of buyer protection (eBay and similar) and thoroughly check and clean and test everything you buy

Haven’t seen this mentioned, but did you make sure to plug the display cable into the GPU and not the MoBo?

edit: nvm, just saw a comment with same suggestion

Nitro+ worth it?

I guess not for that much more. A 10% increase is substantial, and I don’t think the difference in actual performance is enough to justify it; but you also said that your region can get toasty in summer, and the Nitro+ has better cooling which could help. I don’t think the Pulse will get too hot to work, but it may be something to consider!

DDR5

Those are one of the best performance to price ratio, and they’re very inexpensive for what they are (plus full support for AMD overclocking, EXPO I think it’s called); you can also go higher frequency, but prices will go up as well.

cooler

Good call then, AIO will probably perform a bit better with extreme high ambient temps

970

All good, a 970 Evo Plus might be cheaper so why not!

5.0

Yeah, there’s no way gaming will saturate PCIe 5.0 anytime soon, no need to pay premium for specs you won’t benefit from

Happy building and gaming!

About RAM, Trident Z5 NEO @ 6000Mhz seems to be the best price/performance ratio.

About GPU, I’d personally go for a Sapphire as they’re one of the historic AIB for AMD GPUs and I also dig a lot the design of the Nitro+ lol

See if you can save something on the MoBo (by getting a lower trim) and 2x2TB might be a bit overkill for gaming only (ofc it depends on your habits, but I personally don’t have games installed for more than 500-600GB). Also, you picked two PCIe 4.0 NVMEs, so maybe consider a 970 Evo Plus if it’s cheaper than the 980 Pro

About cooler, I’d prefer an old fashioned air cooler simply because it can’t leak lol

Data hoarding haha I know it’s not ideal, and I will build a NAS at some point, but at the moment high-res, high-fps, high-details gaming is a priority!