I edit video, both 3D and 4K. These are extremely taxing on the hardware. There are tools you can install that measure the system performance balance while editing.
When I started editing 4K video I was having trouble getting real time playback from an editing timeline. One tool I used told me I was bottle necked at the SSD drive feeding video frames. So I needed to store my video clips on a faster storage device. The tool also told me that I was not even using all my RAM or CPU cores. So I put in a faster storage, switching from SSD to a PCIe storage card. This is 5 times faster than the SSD. Problem solved. Generally, you want to increase your CPU cores if you typically run multiple software applications. In my case 8 core threads will allow twice as fast rendering video as a 4 core threads but the more cores you have the more RAM you will need. When you run low on Ram, it will page to your SSD C drive, which can slow the OS and software. The fast video card is important too and will help with the display refresh on fast video frames per second. 3D requires twice as much processing as 2D in the graphics card. The key on system design for high performance is to have all the links in the chain equal. One strong link in a weak chain will not do you any good.
For my basic computer I am on now, a 4 core with 8GB RAM and onboard graphics card seems adequate for Chrome, and spreadsheet and word processor. I had a SATA hard drive originally, but decided to upgrade it to an SSD mostly to improve reboot speed. It went from 3 minutes to 45 seconds with the upgrade but the other stuff seems about the same. Internet, WP and spreadsheets seem to not benefit much from a SSD speed. I even run XP mode in the background to windows 7 pro.
Do some reading on computer bottlenecks.
Moo0 is the tool I have been using to tell me when there is a problem with hardware balance.
http://www.moo0.com/?top=http://www.moo0.com/software/SystemMonitor/
I'm sure there are others out there but this one has served me well. I don't run it all the time, only when I think something is causing a bottleneck.
