When you say beginner just how much of a beginner? Can you program? Which languages?
If you're comfortable with C#, you'll find unity a breeze, whereas if you are comfortable with C++ and are open to new ways of doing things (e.g. visual scripting) you'd probably prefer Unreal Engine.
There are many other engines out there such as Godot, most will assume a good level of familarity with a particular programming language to make some progress.
My specs are similar to what you posted, and it's kind of needed for me, i tend to have lots of things open at once. By the time you've got blender, UE4, gimp, visual studio, discord, audacity and a bunch of other stuff all open at once, you'll soon fill that 16gb of ram and be wondering when you can afford to go to 32gb.
Right now my game's project takes about 6.5gb of ram just to open and edit, and here's what task manager looks like for me:
Also, with C++ projects, you'll find that having a solid state drive really does help (and put your project on it as well as your OS!) with build times, as despite what others say, i find that the visual C++ compiler spends a lot of time I/O bound when building large executables and libraries.
Good luck and enjoy!