re: Want to buy a beginners Gaming computer for my son.

I live in Central so probably not far of a drive. So if you want to try your hand at building one, I can be available on a weekend to help out if you get stuck.

Minecraft will run on a potato, and if he plays a lot of first-person shooters like Battlefront, those are generally not demanding enough to really recommend Intel over Ryzen or vice versa.

Bluebarracuda's part list is better, without a doubt. The only part that makes me nervous is that motherboard. I'm generally concerned when it comes to using small form factor value mobos for gaming builds. Gaming PCs get considerably more long-term stress than office PCs, so a cheap board might not handle the load as well -- I'm not saying the PC will catch on fire, but there may be issues like mosfets overheating after a couple hours, causing a slight throttling/performance reduction.

But then again, I have not dealt with AMD Ryzen boards at all. It's just when I look at a $40 board of any brand, I think home/office PC. It also concerns me that it specifies only supporting 65W Ryzen CPUs, which means it's really bare minimum in terms of power management/VRM design. Might be worth going with a board that would support a beefier CPU later down the road. And that's one of the good things about AMD -- they don't change sockets all the time like Intel. So a CPU upgrade path would actually be feasible, without changing the motherboard. Also, I am not recommending you spend $150 on a motherboard either. I'd imagine an $80 board would be perfect.

But anyways, Blue, what do you know about that ASRock? Any reason you picked it other than price?