Welp. Mom's PC popped today on her birthday, so I hopped into a local PC shop and picked up the first combo that didn't make me ill. No complex calculus.
She was supposed to get my then-current computer later, but that schedule's been pushed up.
I already had the case, cooler, PSU, RAM, and SSDs waiting around for a while now, so it just needed a motherboard and CPU. Those ended up being a 12700K and a Z690 Force. Sadly, the AMD motherboard offerings available were either extremely sketchy and low end, or overpriced with nothing in between.
Here it is
I enjoyed the build process mostly, except for the strangely resistive PCI-E slot.
Guess the next stop is Panther Lake/Zen 7, or whatever.