I have been building high-end gaming rigs for over a decade now but I'm actually feeling pretty lost trying to spec out a simple budget office PC for my sister. Usually I just throw a 7800X3D at a problem and walk away but my budget for this entire build is strictly under 500 bucks and I need to buy everything by Friday. I am super pumped to get back into the value side of things though because it feels like a fun challenge to see how much performance I can squeeze out of a cheap chip.

I was leaning towards a Ryzen 5 5600G because the integrated graphics are so solid for the price and I really dont want to deal with a dedicated GPU for someone who just does word processing and heavy web browsing. But then I started looking at the newer AM5 stuff like the 8500G and the prices for DDR5 RAM are making me second guess if it's worth the jump for a basic workstation. Is the 5600G still the king for budget productivity or is there some weird hidden gem in the 4000 series or even the newer Athlon stuff that I'm overlooking? Just need something that won't stutter when she has 30 Chrome tabs and a Teams call going at the same time...