I am honestly so fed up with my old laptop just constantly freezing every time I try to open more than two tabs in Chrome while on a Zoom call. It is the most frustrating thing ever and I am finally ready to just scrap it and build a proper home office desktop. I am actually really excited because this is my first time building something from scratch but I am totally lost on which Intel chip to get. I want something snappy that wont lag when I have massive spreadsheets open but I also dont want to spend a fortune since this is just for work and some light Netflix.

My budget for the processor is around $120 to maybe $150 max because I still need to buy the motherboard and RAM and everything else. I am hoping to get this built by next Friday before my new contract starts since I am working from home now and need a reliable setup.

Here is what I am looking for:

• Needs integrated graphics because I am not buying a separate video card in this economy
• LGA 1700 socket preferred so I have some upgrade path later down the line
• Something that stays cool because my office gets really stuffy in the afternoons
• Must be able to handle multitasking across multiple monitors without lagging

I was looking at the i3-12100 or maybe pushing for an i5 if there is a good deal out there? Is the i3 actually enough or am I gonna regret not getting more cores? I just need this thing to actually work for once...