Building a Facebook machine

[Mestiv]

Hi everyone!

I will be building a new PC for my fiancee in a month or two and I'd like to ask you for help. It's been a while since I built a PC last time and I'm not sure if I have correct judgement anymore.

The computer will be used mainly for heavy internet browsing (>200 tabs in her Firefox ), playing media (Full HD videos) and basic video editing. I know that it is nothing extreme, but I also know, that I want this PC to last for at least 5 years and provide a smooth experience all the time. The machine should be solid but at reasonable price.

So far, my plans are:

• Use an old graphics card from the previous computer (some old GeForce, capable of playing 1080p videos), because video editing will be handled by CPU anyway and there won't be any games played.
• At least 8Gb of DDR4 RAM.
• I want to support AMD, so maybe one of the new Ryzen CPUs? I was thinking about Ryzen 5 with 6 cores.
• Brand new SSD drive for the C: partition and HDD taken from current PC for storage.
• DVD drive from old PC.

Now I'd like to hear your opinions on following questions:

• How to balance my finances between SSD drive,  CPU and RAM? Do SSD speeds have a noticable impact for casual users?
• Motherboards have a quite broad price range. Are there any significant benefits when buying more expensive models? (I know some allow overclocking while others don't. Any other differences?)
• Any other things I should consider?

Please don't recommend any specific components as prices and availability in Poland can be very different. I need a bit more general suggestions.

[Mulk]

I have a five year old computer I put together myself, AMD 4300 chip I think, DDR3 RAM, a gaming mobo (mostly cause I seem to have bad luck with lower end mobos) and a 1060 graphics card.  This computer was chugging and struggling for anything more than youtube (and had some trouble with HD in youtube) before I gave it more RAM and a new video card - my old one was a GeForce 750.  This computer, save for the RAM and the video card is five years old and can run ESO and other online games at decent graphic settings (meaning a hard core gamer would find it unplayable/awful but anyone else shouldn't have any trouble).  I have no idea how it would handle video rendering but this core is doing just fine at five years for all of the other casual stuff you mention, which is great cause I can't afford to replace it anytime soon. 

What you have in mind ought to do fine, assuming you give her enough CPU/RAM to do the video editing.  A casual user, honestly, doesn't really notice the difference in performance unless something is REALLY slow or REALLY fast.  I'm not a professional computer builder but I do work in IT for a living and deal with a lot of end users who range from highly sophisticated users to where's the start button (literally).  Most folks just don't notice or don't care enough about the milliseconds of difference to raise a fuss either way.

I spent more on my mobo. Others have done fine with them, but I've had sockets fail, RAM slots die, random other crap, so I just stay away from those.  The rest of it - honestly, as long as you get enough storage space and some good raw power from your CPU you ought to be fine; don't sweat it too much.