everennui

I think I'm going to end up settling for an Asus GTX 1060. It's a mite less powerful and feature-rich than the 1080, but it's also $300 cheaper. Also going with an Intel i5 7600 processor and Asus MB.

Nice choice on brand. Asus has tons of glowing reviews. I ultimately decided to go with Aorus/Gigabyte because I wanted to keep the MB matched with the video card. I don't know why. I'm sure it would have been fine. ...and the Crosshair 6 was stupid expensive. Turns out the RGB on the card will work in tandem with the MB. So that's an added plus. I'm kind of bummed that my 1700x will create a bottleneck for the GPU, but when the next Ryzen chip comes out, it should - hopefully - be fine.

I also had the same thought -- if the brands match then there's just less chance of goofing up. You are right, it probably doesn't really matter, but I'm such a noob at this that I'd rather not take any chances.

I don't know if you really have to worry about your CPU bottlenecking your GPU. From what I can tell, the CPU is relatively hands-off during most games, and a mediocre processor will not perform inferior to a high-end one. However, if you use your PC for calculation-heavy applications, then it can become an issue.