My son is turning 9 and has been using his computer more and more. he has my old System76 wild dog from 2010, which is a great computer, but is way past the end of its life. He mostly plays minecraft and browser games, though he is doing more artistic stuff in gimp and even a bit of cad for our 3d printer or in blockbench.
We’re looking at a System76 Meerkat for him. For most things I think it would be a huge upgrade, but it is NOT a gaming computer. That being said, his requirements are slim. He mostly plays Switch or on the tablet for “gaming” and I think if it ever came down to it, we could explore things like external GPU’s. He’s not even on steam yet.
The Meerkat can use Intel UHD graphics, or Iris Xe graphics depending on the CPU. I would like some subjective feedback on if those are workable for a kid’s computer, the specs are here (we’d probably go 12th gen CPU): https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat#specs
Could cut that price down even more picking up some used parts locally, but thats quickly putting time into the equation, and money might be more well spent by Op getting something complete in a box vs time spent on all this.