Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
Ok lets see what we can get here... $1245 give or take. This is actually closer to 1200 than I thought. But only because the RAM is essentially free. These are just examples, as there are plenty of other options out there. Some Microcenter combos only come with 16GB of RAM. I would ignore those...
1200 is a tall order without going used. A kit of ram is 300+. A gpu is 400-600. That's half of your budget right there. Maybe you could swing something if there was a microcenter somewhere near. Their bundles are decent.
I'm curious what your SOC voltage was. It might not matter, but I have read some comments in other places about it. I put mine to 1.1 it was 1.3 out of the box.