Budget is whatever it needs to be, but spending less will always be preferred
Well, that's rather ambiguous...
I mean what's the wanted longevity level?
For the time of that graphics card, or to last over at least one graphics card upgrade?
Do you want CPU good for all old Intel stagnation era games and nearly all current games?
Or one which can be considered norm for future's high end games?
Or enough grunt for those high end games and backgrouns softwares and possibly streaming?
And already for case there's major variation in style:
Do you want clean more stylish look, or that ADHD gaming RGB type look?
Then there's the size question...
And do you need optical drive for older games on discs...
Intel Alderlake cpu to be released in approx 3 weeks can you wait ?
Just wouldn't expect much improvements for gaming.
I mean there are still zero gaming performance leaks.
If Intel (who knows PR/marketing shenanigans) had actually improved that significantly, there should be "leaks" to turn people away from AMD.
And that overhyped big.little is causing problems also for DRMs:
https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/intel-alder-lake-cpus-may-not-work-with-older-games
Wouldn't wonder any if you had to disable those little cores in BIOS to avoid performance+other issues in different games.
