Also would either one be able to add the extra 16gb ram? Would it matter on brand also?

I would get the one with the 1TB NVME, because I would just add RAM and SSD afterwards.

Personally in each scenario:
-If I got the one with the 500GB SSD and the 2TB HDD, I would buy an NVME SSD, and an additional storage SSD, then clone the 500GB to the NVME, and plug in the SSD, so now I have extra 500gb SSD and 2TB HDD I am not using (wasted money and time).
-If I got the one with 1TB NVME SSD, I would just add an SSD and be done with it (no wasted money).

At that price tier both PCs will more or less perform about the same outside of benchmarks, you're not really gonna feel much of a difference.

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My current PC uses a 2TB NVME SSDand an 8TB SSD, but it's also self built.

You should be able to add RAM for the Ryzen PC, from the screenshots it looks like 2 slots are empty. Brand doesn't matter so much as speed, you just need to match speed/timings of the RAM. This system seems to be running 2 x 8GB ram.

People like to get 4 sticks of the same RAM because it's easier to match speed/timings.

It's hard to see on the Intel PC but it looks like it's using 4 slots already so you would have to remove RAM to upgrade (wasted money). (4x 4?GB ram, not sure from screenshot).

Awesome man really appreciate it. Is ryzen and intel just preference or is one better or more future proof?

There are significant performance differences at the highest end, but generally people just buy "bang for the buck" and Ryzen chips have more bang. However you're buying a prebuilt so you're not really saving on the bang either way.

On the subject of AMD vs Intel on the preference, there are people who prefer one over the other. But at the end of the day for consumers and people like you, it's about cost and performance, not necessarily preference.

On the links you've provided (and one of the Costco links is broken, with the i7), it's somewhat of a tie/equal between 3900X vs 5800X. But I would recommend 5800X because...what could you be possibly be doing with 12 cores from the 3900X that you would need it? Also looking at the total cost and GPU, 5800X is paired well than the 3900X.

In terms of future proof, none of the options are future proof. You can do small upgrades here and there (such as RAM, storage), but nothing significant like AMD has been. AMD is planning to change their socket and thus motherboards. Intel typically change theirs every two product/generation lines.

You don't need to upgrade your RAM from 16GB to 32GB if you're just gaming and browsing (assuming your browser doesn't have 1,000,000 tabs open). When you add stream into the equation, then that will push you to 32GB.

For example, if I'm playing Cyberpunk, FF15 or whatever game, with my browser (about 10 tabs), with Discord, with Outlook, I'm close to 12GB RAM. Add my XSplit to this and running, I'm at 20GB.

This post was edited by Xet on Jan 27 2022 11:09pm