Not sure if it is still relevant and i’ve also not kept up with all hardware releases as i’d like to. But some thoughts:

• You could look into the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE (or Peerless Assassin, think those are both fairly close). Those are just ridicolously cheap at ~$60 and if you look at reviews give much more expensive coolers a run for their money.

• Not sure what the current verdict is on whether PCIe5 drives give a significant upgrade, but if not you could look at a drive like the Silicon Power US75. When i last looked at SSDs Newmaxx spredsheets and flowcharts were a useful resource and based on those it ticks the boxes for a solid drive.

• As someone else also already suggested some faster RAM might also be a cheap and worthwhile upgrade

• Motherboards are just way to complicated for me to make a deepdive to get up to date again. So i’ll just say that imo Hardware unboxed always has some of the best video roundups. But i think there might potentially be room to get something cheaper and in return invest the saved money somewhere else. Just decide what features you actually need and imo don’t get too hung up on potential future upgrades. Will your dad actually make those upgrades? And would spending $100-150 for a slightly better upgrade path now really be worth it compared to spending them somewhere else. Either on the build itself or peripherals like a nicer monitor etc.

• I assume the case is already purchased based on the list? Otherwise this might be something to let him choose somewhat based on looks.

Just as a hypotherical example with all changes it would look like this atm ~$2900 vs $3300. Note that i just put in a cheaper motherboard, but didn’t really read up much on it, so that would require some more investigation. This would either make it cheaper or leave room in the budget for other things like an even better GPU/CPU or on peripherals. Really depends on what he plans to do with it.