Build advice

Would your real build please stand up?

There is no way you will ever need or use 64 GB of RAM for gaming during the life of this (or the other) system. 32 GB is beyond present needs, but might come into use a few years down the road.

The storage choices are 2100/1600 MB/second read/write speed vs 7000/5000 MB/second for the 980, and 3500/3300 MB/second for the 970. Up to you, but you really want all you can get for Primary drive. The DS one is a fine alternative for Drive 2.

I can't recommend you blow an extra $633 AND your budget on a card that will be sucking it to a much better 4070 by Fall. You haven't even told us what your monitor is, but the 3060 Ti is very good at 1440p, and the best in the world at 1080p. It can even do 4K at modest framerates. My best guess is it will make you very happy at least until you see what the new ones can do, and probably beyond that.

Already told you about the CPU OC and the "OS boost".

If prices become sane again, that $633 might pay for practically the whole upgrade to the next gen. Just sayin'.   

That's a monitor I've liked for a long time, and several who have that one are very happy with it. The build we came up with on the other post is about perfect for running that at frame rates at or over 100 per second on highest settings. It comes with DLSS Gen 2 which is Deep Learning Super Sampling. That allows you to turn it on and improve your framerates without loss of quality. Framerates higher than 100 fps are completely overrated. Not many of us can even tell a difference.

This is not the killer card for 1440p, but it will not disappoint you. My point here is that there is a newer batch of cards right around the corner that will out-perform this gen by a wide margin. Don't bet the farm; pay a dumb premium price; go over budget for a card that will be blown out of the water in a few months. The tech that comes along with higher speeds such as Ray Tracing, DLSS, and better memory management in each new generation improves so much, it's worth waiting for.

This card is the equivalent of last gen's SECOND BEST CARD, the 2080 SUPER, which no one in their right mind would have said wasn't good for 1440p:

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3060-Ti-vs-Nvidia-RTX-2080S-Super/4090vs4050

Only it's actually better because of advances in Ray Tracing, DLSS, and memory access over the older card. A 4070 will assuredly KILL a 3080, and cost less, if you find the 3060 Ti doesn't please you.

That's my best advice. Do what you want, it's your money.