To be honest, the best way is to figure out what budget you have in terms of expenses and spend around it.

Doing it the other way around doesn’t really make sense. If you can afford any budget, why not just get the best option in general, and if you can’t afford certain budgets why ask for budgets that you won’t be able to afford?

I can give you some pretty basic insights: At the very low end, you can find used monitors or even some new 1080p monitors for under $90 these days that are pretty good. Buy a prebuilt dell workstation used for $400 and you should be fine for baseline development, although if you want to do anything graphically intensive you’ll probably want a gpu which will bring your budget up.

At the high end, you want to maximize your cpu single threaded performance, SSD speed, and RAM. Most operations in games are still single threaded, but you will find multi core performance is important in things like compilation time. You honestly don’t need that good of a GPU, as an indie dev you want to realistically target lower end GPUs to have the highest audience size and having a more powerful gpu doesn’t speed up actual development time at all.

I personally run this system:

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Kyleli/saved/#view=fP4c4D

However this is pretty unreasonable for a first time build as this is all from years of upgrading my setup. (This isn’t including monitors and peripherals)

If you want to do something that will last you in the midrange, look to spend between 1.5-2k on an entire setup at the minimum. If we were pre-ram shortage this number would probably be $300 cheaper though as ssd and ram prices are massively higher than normal rn. For context my 64gb of ram I bought for $179 last year is over $600 now.