I've been reviewing laptops for over two decades now. So I know my stuff; from thermal throttling under heavy workloads to ...

To make matters more confusing, two PCs could have nearly identical specs, but one could still be a better buy for reasons ...

Ideally, stick to Ryzen 5 or better, as that will give you a good number of cores and high-enough clocks for fast every day use as a strong baseline, provided you plan on overclocking your CPU.