I've seen a few other similar threads, and keen to take advantage of the collective wisdom of this parish.

This is intended to be a higher-end daily driver for various desktop tasks. In practice, that seems to be fairly similar to a low end gaming PC. I am a heavy user of the Microsoft Office suite, and an extremely heavy user of Chrome browser tabs.* I also dabble in coding (learner), CAD (DIY home workshop, 3D printing, and CNC routing). Every now and then there is home movie/home photo editing or knocking up a Publisher document or similar.

While I would like to game more, that isn't going to happen with this build (and in the unlikely event something happens to gaming viable, I have a good 30-odd retro/classic games purchased and never downloaded waiting on GOG. And describing something as retro/classic when it dates from the 2000s makes me feel old).

As per another one of my threads, I'm targeting driving two QHD/1440p monitor (aiming for Freesync monitors)

Current build (pricing all PBtech full price, will likely wait for sales and aiming pick it up at least some items for a little less than this):

 

• AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6 Core,12 Threads - $308.99
• ASRock B450M Steel Legend mATX motherboard - $175.00 (per yet another thread, I know I might need a BIOS upgrade to support the 3rd gen CPU)
• G.SKILL Trident Z RGB F4-3200C16D-32GTZR 32GB RAM (2 x 16GB) DDR4 3200Mhz - $339.00
• Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB M.2 (2280),NVMe SSD - $182.85
• ASRock RX 570 Phantom Gaming D 4GB graphics card - $251.85
• Cooler Master Silencio S400 Silent MATX Mini Tower Case for mATX - $148.35 
• Cooler Master MWE Gold 650W 80Plus Gold Full Modular Power Supply - $164.94
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition CPU Cooler - $74.75 
• Microsoft Windows Professional 10 64bit OEM - $251.85 

Total is $1,900 (at full price). I was hoping to spend a little bit less than this, but may achieve that if sale pricing is okay. But would rather spend more to get good value - hard limit is about $2K for this, monitors will be extra. I have a nice keyboard and mouse that will transition across. I also have a NAS for storage of bigger files, videos etc. My current main notebook is 256 GB and haven't even come close to filling this.

This is my first build from scratch (always wanted to do it, never quite had the courage, time or budget, then got subsumed in a series of notebooks). Also the first time in at least 20 years that I've specified something other than Intel. It's a brave new world!

* My browsing style is essentially that of a hydra. I read a page, opening every link that looks interesting/relevant in a new tab. Each page I read spawns a multitude of other tabs. Those tabs stay open until read. And when things get a bit ridiculous, I make it worse by opening a new Chrome window and repeating. On days where I work on a few different work and personal projects, it wouldn't be uncommon for me to have half a dozen tabs open on each of various work, coding, CAD, Linux bash 101 commands, and DIY topics. I frequently have 50+ tabs open simultaneously - not necessarily using all those concurrently, but more "to come back to this later". It is a terrible habit, but not one that is likely to be broken easily.

32GB would seem to be an extravagence in an otherwise relatively modest buyild, but it is more feeding my tab habit.