Thanks for the shout out @Austin and the 2667 is still fantastic for games with it’s 4ghz turbo it’s some of it’s siblings(like the very popular 2670) that aren’t as hot only hitting 3.3ghz(still good but not ideal for say a competitive fps)
The most important things to decide before looking at any specifics are your software(shotcut is a given but what else are you using? I know audacity is a standard for me), budget(a 1000 dollar 4k machine is very different from a 3000 dollar one) and if you’re willing to use refurbished hardware to really push that budget to the limit.
Since you’re after a cheap system I’m going to err on the side of some refurbished hardware and refurbished hardware when possible which brings us right to that e5-2667 Austin mentioned, it’s actually what i’ve been eyeing for a while at about 150 on ebay they’re fantastic chips with a trick up their sleeve compared to current consumer chips, with the right motherboard you can simply drop in a second cpu and you’re at 16 cores with a 3.3 to 4ghz clock
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=e5-2667+v2&_sacat=0&_sop=15
On the motherboard side for chips like that there’s a few good options, you can opt for something like an off lease workstation that will include a psu and other accories(ram, hdd’s cpu’s and possibly a gpu depending on the particular example) or you can get a bare board from all the usual suspecs plus a few server market only vendors(like tyan or supermicro)
A dell precision(though I have a slightly earlier model) is actually what I cut 4k on myself currently and for a few hundred you can get all the necesities in one small bundle
A system like that is a fantastic starting point since you can upgrade things as you need, sure 2609’s are slower than the 2667’s(and with half the cores) but they work out of the box and you can buy cpu’s next month, and then a gpu instead of all at once(although it would need a hdd)
Starting from scratch with a bare board lets you get features a workstation like that might not have though, I have a board like this one in one of my servers and love the fact that the pike(raid controller) doesn’t use one of the standard pcie slots
or one like this offers more memory slots instead
a LGA2011 board for xeon’s like that is going to typically run between 100 and 200 dollars depending on features like built in controllers(single through quad port nic or even 10 gig, sometimes LSI raid controllers) and size(typically matx for some single socket rarities up through EATX for the biggest ones as well as some OEM only models)
one huge benefit to using refurbished hardware is memory is much cheaper, I have 192GB ECC DDR3 in my tower not because I need the full capacity(I rarely us more than 50gb) but with DDR3 ECC modules being so cheap any of the boards I showed you will blow right past typical consumer board limits(typically 64gb some 128gb) at a fraction of the cost.
Finally the gpu side, this is where you really don’t want to go “too old” anything older than a maxwell gpu(nvidia 9xx and quadro m series) is going to be less than ideal, the good news is you don’t need a huge gpu to do anything, most of shotcuts rendering is cpu based so I’d suggest a good pascal card(like a quadro P2000 or P4000) which can be found for 250 or 450 respectivly, these have the advantage over their consumer counterparts of better color output(10 bits per chanel in openGL mode) as well as better support for professional applications and lower thermal limts than their consumer counterparts(the 1060 and 1070 respectively) I currently use a P4000 as it was the most powerful card I could fit in a single slot actually.
