LaggyTech567

Yeah i am also going to echo the recommendation of the Ryzen 5 3600
I am also not a AMD fanboy or employee but yes AMD has scored big time with its Ryzen series and for your budget its impossible for me to recommend anything intel based as most low cost Intels are so underpowered compared to AMD at this time period.
Even if you are in love with Intel and consider AMD the Antichrist there is no good intel based machine for your budget right now without making sacrifices somewhere else.

Ok. Thank you for helping me! You've probably helped me the most in choosing which CPU I should get. You were very helpful and I can't thank you enough! ?
 
Thank you to everyone else who helped me as well!

The extra threads means the cpu can handle more work per core in multi threaded applications. For example, streaming, heavy multi tasking, rendering, editing, cad and etc. It's the reason why people buy hyper threaded Intel cpus, it's the same situation. 

I agree. If you still want an HDD for bulk storage, I would recommend getting a 120-256 GB SSD for the OS and getting a 2TB HDD. When getting an SSD, make sure to get one with DRAM cache. It will have better performance and better longevity than a cheaper SSD that doesn't have a DRAM cache.
 
Maybe even a 1TB HDD, if you don't have that many games or large files. If you have a lot of things you need to store, then you should get a 2TB one.

Also, scrap the HDD and get a 1TB SATA SSD. Crucial BX for example 

and the ram speed could decrease its performance by a bit, but you can do some tinkering and get great performance anyways

Don't worry. You're not being rude, just cautious. 
 
To ease your fear, I am not an AMD employee, I'd have a industry affiliate tag if I were from any tech company. 
 
The RAM is a tad slow for modern cpus but it will work fine. 

I can assure you he's not paid by amd lol, they probably wouldn't even bother going in a forum and i've seen him answer non amd related posts. The great improvement in terms of productivity comes from the fact that the 3600 has smt enabled, which gives him 12 threads contrary to the i5's 6 threads. And productivity workloads usually love these sweet threads

No, user benchmarks is a horrible source akin to the meme that is GPU Boss. The gaming performance is with 3% of each other depending on the game. Some like Ryzen higher IPC, others like Intels lower latency. For everything other than gaming, the 12 threads of the 3600 make it a good 40% faster

It has a beefy VRM setup for the price and can easily power a future upgrade to 12 or more cores. 

From the three I would recommend the 5 2600 non x if you plan on overclocking. 
If you just want plug and play , 2600x

Hah, thanks - I wonder where it could've come from

Even better, btw I like your profile pic  

Or, if he gets a B450 Tomahawk, he can use the BIOS flashback to update it himself

If you can get a R5 3600 and a B450 board that has the correct BIOS to run it out of the box then you should definitely get one. It's an absolutely amazing CPU at it's price point. Depending on where you buy the motherboard from they might update the BIOS for you before the board is shipped. It'll come with a Ryzen 3000 series ready sticker on the box. 

The R5 3600 with a B450

None - the Ryzen 5 3600 is about 190$ and is much faster than all three of those in everything.