Ive been building PCs for years mostly for gaming but my sister just asked me to help her put together a budget rig for her YouTube channel and honestly Im a bit stumped on the AMD side of things lately. Ive always been an Intel guy because of quicksync but prices are just ridiculous right now so I’m looking at Ryzen and getting really hyped to finally try a Team Red build. She is shooting 4K on a Sony A7III and the files are huge so Im really worried about playback lag in the timeline more than anything else since stuttering drives me crazy.

I have got about $200-250 specifically for the processor and I want to pick it up this weekend from Micro Center since I live right near one. I was looking at the 5000 series because the AM5 boards and DDR5 ram are still kinda pricey for a true budget build but then I saw some benchmarks saying the newer architecture makes a massive difference for rendering times even with fewer cores. Its for DaVinci Resolve mostly which I know likes cores but it also relies on the GPU a lot so maybe I can save some cash on the CPU to put elsewhere?

Does it make sense to stick with something like a 5700X for the extra cores or should I jump to the 7600 even if it means fewer cores but faster single-threaded performance? Which AMD chip is actually the sweet spot for a budget video editing build right now...