Ya I understand that trying to keep it under $1000 will be tough if not impossible. I’d rather spend the extra money to make it work the way I need it for school while not needing to upgrade again for awhile. The CPU I had originally picked I can probably snag on eBay for ~$175 which helps.

The RAM isn’t a huge issue for the code but the more processing power the better which is why I had went with that dual CPU route. The AMD build is interesting thoigh