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Notes -
These are completely understandable requirements, but I will note that I chuckled at your list -- Office documents and PDFs, along with even many browser tabs, are definitely a solid set of real-world work computer requirements, but they're also not that demanding. You could get away with a comparatively modest system for this, with some wiggle room for memory requirements. Then you had to throw a CAD program in there, and boy does that add considerable expense to what you need. But if that's what you need, that's what you need.
Right now is possibly the worst time of all times to need a computer upgrade, so I feel for you. Memory and solid state storage are at ludicrous levels, close to plaid. Unfortunately that means these are going to make up a much larger chunk of your costs than they ought to. My feeling is that 32-64 GB of RAM would be the target; I had a system with 16GB, and even without the CAD requirement it desperately needed a memory upgrade. My advice would be to go for a set of two 16GB sticks for now, which would put you at the recommended level for a lot of CAD software and gives you room to grow based on your needs.
The lower GPU requirements that gattsuru talked about are actually a blessing here -- that's another huge cost center, and you can shave some of the cash that gamers have to spend on graphics and allocate it to memory. Generally people doing CAD work would have a pre-built, possibly workstation-grade computer from a major manufacturer bought by their workplace as part of a large contract deal. Those are expensive because they're calibrated for businesses to expense them. I would not, in general, recommend a gaming-oriented pre-built for your needs, and I think your willingness to try your hand at building is the right call. You'll have to keep us updated!
I'll also join gattsuru in saying that unfortunately even in today's world a computer won't last 15 years, even if you spec it out. That's particularly true if you're doing CAD work or trying to keep up with the web.
And Microsoft might not even give you the option: my 9-year-old system works great, especially as I've continued to upgrade the memory and SSDs to higher-end components over the years, but Windows 11 cut off support for it. There are ways around that, but they're hacky and unofficial, and if you're using a computer for work you want it to work and be properly supported. Linux keeps it going though.
You shouldn't feel bad about your level of knowledge -- you have a great awareness of your needs, you can explain them well and in a way that makes it easy to understand and give advice, and you have opinions on the software you use for the work you do. That's solid.
Thanks for the advice! I did feel a bit silly mentioning the first set of requirements, as I would normally expect any decent computer to be able to handle them without any issues; however, my previously reliable work computer has proven unable to handle even as few as 150 tabs without crashing ever since the company forced everyone to upgrade to Windows 11.
The CAD usage is for free-lance architectural consulting, and I may be able to get some of my clients to help cover the cost of extra RAM. If not, it’s good to know that 32 GB should be enough for now.
Wow, I thought I was a tab user. 150 tabs! My man!
And based on the other replies to my comment, sounds like 11 really did mess with a lot of people's performance. I had to buy a new PC for 11 so I experienced it as an 'upgrade', but Microsoft's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is unmatched.
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In the days of XP, or even early on for Windows 10, this was the case.
The latest versions of Office and Windows are brutal performance regressions, with CoPilot and phone-home services making everything slow to a crawl. I say this as a big fan of Microsoft software, which I know is profoundly uncool to be.
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A better way to think about it is that web pages and apps are ridiculously ineffective while Office and PDF viewers are if not optimized, at least not 1000x pessimized by design simply due to having decades long history, no time for rewrite from the ground up in "modern" languages and generally the core is written by people who have at least some idea what they're doing.
A general rule of thumb I've found is that it's flat out impossible to have too much disk space if you use the computer for any sort of entertainment or hobby stuff beyond web browsing and the right amount of RAM is to take your initial estimate and double it. Hence me using this 2018 model laptop for C++ development, photo editing, running AI audio tools etc without problems because I made sure to upgrade to 64 GB ram and many TBs of SSD storage.
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