

I hate to say it, but prebuilts are the absolute best bang for your buck that you can get now. At least for another month or two until the shortages start impacting OEM inventories.
Right now you can get decent high end ish machines like this: https://www.costco.com/p/-/ibuypower-element-gaming-pc-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5070-12gb-windows-11-home-32gb-ram-2tb-ssd/4000384603?langId=-1 and like 35% of the total machine cost washes out to JUST the memory right now. You’ll need to replace the PSU and likely the water cooler for the long term, but the bones are relatively good.








A Minecraft server is the classic.
Don’t discount just putting together a basic webpage that can be accessed at home too- something he could put together in a basic HTML editor (drag and drop) and put his favorite things on or whatever he may be focusing on (cars, animals, space, you name it).