Go for RAM size. Video editing uses a lot of it.

Don’t bother with the X3D CPUs, video editors don’t benefit from the extra cache, the problem with the stacked dies is that it makes moving heat out of the CPU harder, so they tend to run at lower clock speeds, so with a normal CPU, you’ll get a little bit more performance on video tasks, while the hit on gaming performance will be minimal, especially if you play at higher resolutions where the GPU will be the limiting factor.

As for storage, get an NVMe that’s big enough to store the games you’re playing and the video project you’re working at the moment, so access is quicker. for other projects and games you don’t play often, put them on an HDD or NAS with 10Gb Ethernet.

As for graphics cards, Nvidia has better video encoding than AMD at the moment and great gaming performance, but don’t dismiss Intel Arc, they’re entry-level for gaming, but have a stellar performance in video encoding. Considering the price difference between AMD and Nvidia, you could pretty much buy an RX 7900XTX and an Arc A750 for the same price of an RTX 4080, so you could use one for gaming and the other for encoding. The advantage of this is that you could play games on the AMD card at the same time the encoding is running on the Intel.

Haven’t built a video station in ages, but that was one area that used CPU cores efficiently. I went with lots of cores to encode video. I have a dual Xeon setup that was overkill. However, while it was wild on multithreaded performance, single thread lagged behind other CPU’s which hurt gaming a tad.

I didn’t need a ton of RAM for editing, 16gb was plenty for my use, but Aftereffects pigged out on it. The more you had, the faster and more concurrent processes you could perform. It was the only time I realized I had bad RAM because it was the only program that used it all. I would choose quantity over speed in this case for heavy lifting.

Thesedays processed are offloaded to GPU so a good card will help, but as it doubles as a gaming station, you probably got that covered.

NVMe is a definite these days. The whole system is snappy. Brought life back to my 10+ year old desktop.

But I’d nix the HDD. Even my first editing station had removable drives because they filled up or became unreliable. It wasn’t the best system and its best to engineer out single points of failure. In fact, I had a editing friend lose his entire senior project for graduation because a drive died. I’d spring for a small NAS box with RAID. 10G networking is more available now and a stack of cheaper drives can save you money and work together faster than a single drive. Just remember, RAID is not a backup. (But I’ve only had 3 failures in the past 25 years and they were easy fixes with no data loss) Knock on wood

CPU, I would look at an i5/R5. Ideally I’d want to a 7 or 9, but a 5 will do. Yes, cores and speed matters. There is a reason this aspect gets benchmarked. For stability reasons, and their software stack (eg: QuickSync), I’d also stick to Intel. Doubly so if you’re not using a graphics card.

RAM: 16GB minimum, ideally I’d want to about 32GB. More is nice, but not really needed.

GPU: Avoid AMD, they just can’t compete with Nvidia Nvanc. I don’t think there is much support for Intels GPU QuickSync, right now. So, stick with Nvidia. At minimum, go with an 8GB card, more is nice… but that gets pricy, real quick. Something like a 3060ti is a nice budget (for this kind of work) option. You might also be able to pick up an older Quadro on eBay… though be careful on what card you’re buying.

Storage: You CAN use an older spinning drive, but if you do, try to use an SSD Scratch Disk. Also please run Windows and programs from an SSD.