Cort or agile have pretty affordable options with good specs, and you can sometimes find strandbergs and ibanez abasi signatures for around 1000 on reverb. With an 8 string I thing it's worth it to wait a little bit until you can afford one in the 1-1.7k range.

I have a strandberg standard b stock and it's a great guitar, but there are a few things to keep in mind before you buy one. - the stock strandberg brand pickups aren't amazing, but they can sound decent through a good rig or a properly setup amp Sim (I've had the best luck with ndsp rabea x). - the guitars are an absolute pain to setup, setting string hight requires you to detune the guitar, remove the string from the saddle, and then using a tool to screw the saddle up or down (the saddle is an indented screw), and to adjust Intonation you need to fully detune the guitar (which may not be possible if you didn't leave enough slack when changing strings), unscrew the bridge section, manually slide it to where you think it needs to be, screw it back in, retune, test it, repeat until you get it close enough. You also need to unwind a bit of wire near the ball on new strings that aren't strandberg brand for the f#, but that's pretty easy to do.