I need a new desktop machine. Does anyone have any opinions?

Yeah well 9 years ago I built the PC Im using. It has a Core i7 920 and it still never bogs down. I paid $289.99 for the CPU and the rest of the system was $900. I remember when I went to Frys to buy the parts, I was split between the Core i7 and a Core 2 Duo or Quad CPU. The salesman said the i7 was better for the future and he was right.

The only thing you have to worry about is hitting the point of diminished returns. This is going too far overkilling it. Sooner or later 8gb of RAM wont be enough to cut it and quad core processors will meet the same fate.

If you build or buy a cheap machine, it wont last as long. Yeah, you can build a PC with a Pentium g4560 but how long would it be useful? At the least you could upgrade the CPU and RAM and that will sometimes breathe new life into your PC.

AMD processors have more cores and more overall processing power than Intel's processors. You could buy a quad core or a hexa core and upgrade the CPU later when it gets too slow. You will have to buy a dedicated graphics card with a Ryzen processor because Ryzen processors have no iGPU.

AMD processors give you more cores but Intel processors have better single core performance.

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in that case choose a desktop that has an absolute min of 8gb ram fitted with empty slots to double that to 16gb, not for example 2 slots each containing 4gb which would mean you have to throw away 8gb to fit 16gb in its place. if you dont game, then any intel kaby lake cpu would be great. AMD ones just arent as good as basic pc's. choose a pc with at least a 500 watt psu so if you wanted to, you could fit a half decent gpu. as you might at some stage want to EDIT videos. if you insist on an amd based pc, then look at the sites like cyberpowerpc which have US and UK version websites. i say this because they usually tell you what MAINBOARD is inside their pc and in fact you can now fully customise(swap) parts to get a build you are happy with. so only two main requirements min 8gb ram, upgradeable to 16gb and a psu of at least 500 watts so a reasonable gpu eg a Nvidia GTX1050 can be fitted. *** by knowing what the MAINBOARD is that is fitted, you can visit the mainboard makers site to make other informed decisions and get a real feel for whats gonna be inside the box. eg a popular one they are using right now is an ASROCK AB350 Pro 4 see the link. a nice basic pc mainboard with multi gpu upgrade possibilities, 4 ram slots for ddr4 3200, and 2 m.2 ssd sockets and much more and yet still only a basic board by modern standards.

You don't need the latest processors, or a ton of memory, or a superfast GPU to have a good performing machine. I would suggest getting any machine with the following specifications (non-gaming):

(1) 8GB to 16GB of RAM. Going for more won't get you much better performance. DDR3 or DDR4 are the current standards, the one you need is determined by your choice of processors.

(2) quad-core or quad-thread processor, or higher. Quad-core is the minimum you need these days for good responsiveness. There are processors with as many as 16-cores or 32-threads, but you will never need that many.

(3) 3.0GHz+ processor speed if it's a desktop, about 2.4GHz+ processor if it's a laptop.

(4) SSD, almost any SSD will make a night and day difference to the overall performance of the system. Suggest having a 120GB+ SSD and pair it with a 1TB+ HDD, it makes for the best combination of speed and storage capacity.

For a non-gaming PC, you don't need a separate GPU, the integrated GPU is more than good enough.

Get a Lenovo with a fast processor and a decent bored they are Rock Solid look on eBay and you will find many of them under $300 that are very capable