For the Ryzen 5, it's hard to go wrong with the B450 series here which is known to have a combo of great parts at a low price. Mine's a B450 Mortar I got at ~$60 on special from r/buildapcsales and it even has twin M.2 drives.
You have a TON of options for videocards, and the "real" limit is how much you want to spend and how comfortable you are with a used card. Cryptominers are jumping ship left and right so the last generation of GeForce 1070 and 1080 cards are super cheap, and I've also locally seen AMD Radeon 570/580s used in miner racks as well- if you know how to flash BIOS or find good instructions on how to do it, it's definitely worth a look as they are still very competitive.
Intel and nVidia's naming conventions really suck. Basically, your son has a 1050 which is from the same "Generation" as the 1060, 1070, 1070, 1080 and the ti variants. The recent creation of the Tensor core means new cards are capable of ray tracing, a method that basically makes water look perfect in games and light preform to physics. It's big E36 M3, but in reality there's only a handful of games that support it let alone a machine that can process it (Linus Tech Tips has a minecraft server running ray tracing with a dedicated, water cooled system costing over $3,000; he only gets around 60FPS when he runs 1080p) so it's led to a big problem with nobody seeing any reason to buy $500-$800 cards when used miner cards did nearly the same thing for less than half the cost. Anyway, those are the 20- series, so the 2060, 2070 and 2080. Finally, you have more basic dies and systems built upon the aforementioned 10- series but with the tensor cores popped into them, making for cheap cards that can do more things over stock. Those are the 16- series, and YES it's confusing. It includes the 1650, 1660, and 1660ti.
As for AMD, it's a little easier with the RX line and Vega (and the Radeon VII but that thing is... weird, like the video card equivalent of a Tucker). Vega is the near-equivalent to the 10- series with a 56 going against the 1070s and the 64 against the 1080 (The 1080ti has no competition outside of the new 2080) while the RX lineup competes with the lower 1050/1060 and below. AMD/Radeon tend to like power and make up for lacking brute processor strength by loading up on RAM and options- AMD is a turbo'ed engine while nVIDIA just shouts NO REPLACEMENT instead, essentially.
Since you have a 5-series Ryzen CPU you're baseline is likely around the RX570/580 and 1060 6GB cards which are some of the best bang-for your buck cards out there. If you're wanting new, it's hard to go wrong with the 1660ti. Radeon 5700 might be overkill, you'll have to post what processor you have. Also, make sure your power supply is up to this upgrade.
dean1484 said:
For now I would stay away from AMD. There drivers can be sketchy and they are power hungry and run hot.
Maybe a few years ago. The sketchiest thing they've put out was the Radeon VII and that was an odd one-off that's already out of production- my Vega64 is a blower style that's never given me problems, even during the promotion with DMC5 that I got it from.
