Haha, I love the way you asked 'what is too much?' This is a click bait article yes, but I think it makes good points: The Best PCs You Can Build for $300, $600, and $1200 I had a discussion recently with a buddy who builds PC's every other year in order to stay on top of industry standards. He just upgraded his SSD to the newer types that allows him to go over 1gigabit speeds instead of 550ish speeds on SATA3. I asked him about whats a good system and a bad system, but as others said here, basically, it depends on your usage. I for one, enjoy editing photos and videos, thus I would benefit from more RAM and more cores/higher processor speeds. I was thinking about going with an old school Dell Workstation which uses dual Xeon processors at 4 cores each meaning 8 total real cores at about 3ghz for each processor, those can be had for ~$300 from eBay now, but the RAM is DDR2. On the other hand, purchasing a quad core i5 will yield great results at a lower numbers of cores, but newer DDR3 ram will probably be better also; albeit the cost of the newer system. For gaming, that sort of system is already annoyingly over compensated. I think a dual core set up with a nice video card will do wonders with an 8gb RAM thrown in as well. But it will also work well for editing too, just slightly slower, but you'll have to wait during editing anyway while its being processed (especially if you're working with a big film you put together). Its probably better to just have a second PC or laptop for Redditing or what not while it does that job. Lol but all in all I think you should just try to go with the lowest amount possible and add on from there. I'm a big car guy as well as cpu geek, and whenever I see new drivers at the track with nice newer sports cars, but can't drive for scrap because they haven't yet practiced enough behind the wheel, then that hunk of metal and 4 wheels does nothing for them until they get up to date with their experience. Same goes with CPU stuff. Just start slow and build up, chances are the stuff you want to get NOW that are new and top of the line will be much cheaper 6 months to a year from now, or at least during Thanksgiving's Black Friday sales coming up in a few months. Saving a few bucks is also a good habit anyway. Plus if you build a slower system and decide to build another one, a faster bigger one, then you can use your old one as a quick workstation to do remedial surfing while the other can be your gaming rig. Hopefully that helps!