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Hardware upgrades for increased speed?
Hi folks,
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this, but I’m not the most computer savvy person and there are lots of contradicting opinions. I would be so grateful for any input.
I use After Effects for all kinds of motion graphics – from animated infographics to movie-style titles. I use Element 3D for any 3D work. I use Premiere Pro for editing 4k video footage, and have recently been commissioned to edit a series of 1-hour teaching videos. The 1 hour videos have taken a really long time to render, and I find Premiere isn’t as fast as I’d like at playing back video in real time.
I’d really love to speed up previews in both AE and Premiere, and reduce the render times too. I’ve tried a lot of tips to speed things up, but I think I may need to purchase some new hardware.
I have around £500 to spend. The first thing I’ve been looking at is a better GPU, but I wonder if a better processor or more RAM would be better? If not, does anyone have any recommendations or guidance on which GPU to go for? And whether it would likely make any significant improvements?
My current setup is as follows:
OS & Software
Windows 7 (but will shortly upgrade to Windows 10)
Using latest versions of AE and Premiere Pro on subscriptionMotherboard:
MSI X99S SLI Plus Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATXProcessor:
Intel i7-5820K 3.30GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3RAM:
Avexir Platinum 32GB RAM DDR4 2400MHz Quad ChannelGraphics Card:
Asus GeForce GTX 780 Direct CU II 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-ExpressHard drives:
Samsung 970 EVO Plus V-NAND M.2 500GB SSD (for OS and current projects)
Samsung 250GB SSD (for cache)Thanks very much in advance.
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5 Replies
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Double your RAM and edit in HD instead of UHD. That’s my off-the-cuff, zero warranty opinion ☺ Also, I bet Puget Systems has some articles that you might find informative.
James Nielson
http://www.megafauna.org -
Hey Paul,
with the budget you have in mind, the only good investment would be indeed, as James suggested – adding more RAM. At least in AE, GPU has close to zero influence, apart from few effects, which are optimised for GPU utilisation a bit further. The best possible improvement would be getting higher end CPU/higher clock speed, which suits your motherboard’s socket.
Leaving aside direct hardware upgrades – not sure whether you already using it, but the CPU’s with ‘k’ after the model name, signifies that it is unlocked version. Simply said – it can be overclocked to higher processing speed. The old days of overclocking are over – its a lot easier to do this nowadays through BIOS, without a need to be real geek ☺ Just google out the guide, and you will be able to increase the clock speed to use the full capacity.
It would be interesting if you make a comparison of render speed of some project, before and after the overclocking. I am sure you will notice some improvement. Again, if you haven’t done this yet 🙂
Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting. -
A software solution, but definitely worth looking into: Rendergarden.
Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer -
Dave,
I can’t comment on this too much whether it fails or not, but 4 years ago I had i5 2500k, overclocked to 4.2Ghz. Didn’t faced any issues, haven’t troubleshooted anything in particular on this topic.
Its like with everything – you must know the boundaries from which point the risk is not worth coping with. While there are guides which allows clocking speed to 4.7-5Ghz for 2500k – haven’t tried it myself.
Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting. -
Wow, thank you everyone for taking the time to reply to my post – I really appreciate it.
I shall definitely look into Rendergarden and articles on Puget Systems
I bought the PC from a company called overclockers, so I’ll go back to them and ask about overclocking (I seem to remember they were going to do that)
Once I’ve tried those I shall look at upgrading the RAM
Thanks again – you guys are the best! I shall post results from the suggestions as and when I try them 🙂
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