Upgrade Graphics Card

[Andy Patterson]

I think your Xeon CPU only has 4 cores with hyper threading. Your best bet would an i7 Coffee Lake CPU and a GTX 1080 Ti. If you want to upgrade the CPU to at least a 6 cores (8 would be better) and then get a GTX 1080 Ti you should have a decent system. I think your NVIDIA Quadro K2000 only has 384 CUDA cores. That is indeed a big problem. Upgrading the GPU would help more than anything but the CPU is not really up to the task of 4K at full resolution either. Spending $1,000.00 on a a new GPU and using a mediocre CPU is not wise. Premiere Pro needs a good CPU and GPU both. The CPU plays back the video codecs and the GPU handles the effects. I hope this helps.

[Jeff Pulera]

The GTX 1080 is great for Premiere, but since your CPU is not quite up to standards, the GTX 1070 might be a good match for price/performance. As the GPU is used for scaling in Premiere, the 1070 or 1080 card should help out when editing UHD in an HD sequence.

Make sure you have fast, dedicated storage also and are not editing media off the C: drive.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Susan Fielding]

Thank you for the suggestions!! I’m not in a position to upgrade my machine, but your input on the GPU is very helpful!

My Specs:
HP h8 Desktop
Six Core Processor: Intel i7 3820 3.60 GHz
Windows 7 64 bit
10 GB Ram
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7670
Vegas Pro 11.0 build 683

[Andy Patterson]

[Susan Fielding] “Thank you for the suggestions!! I’m not in a position to upgrade my machine, but your input on the GPU is very helpful!”

You could get a mediocre GTX 1060 or GTX 1050 and watch 4K at 1/2 and 1/4 resolution. I use a GTX 1060 and an old Haswell CPU. Your CPU probably will not decode 4K at full resolution anyhow. If you upgrade the CPU to a 6 core and bought a GTX 1080 Ti you could watch 4K at full resolution. If you don’t have a 4K monitor 1/4 resolution will work just fine. Editing 4K at 1/4 resolution is not hard. Editing 4K at full resolution is. Can your system as of now even playback one layer of 4K at 1/4 resolution?

[Todd Perchert]

[andy patterson] “You could get a mediocre GTX 1060 or GTX 1050 and watch 4K at 1/2 and 1/4 resolution.”

Guess that all depends on the flavor of 4k and data rate. Don’t know what sort of storage it’s coming off of… I didn’t see that posted.
TC

[Andy Patterson]

[Todd Perchert] “[andy patterson] “You could get a mediocre GTX 1060 or GTX 1050 and watch 4K at 1/2 and 1/4 resolution.”

Guess that all depends on the flavor of 4k and data rate. Don’t know what sort of storage it’s coming off of… I didn’t see that posted.
TC”

Striping 5 or 6 hard drives together would be wise if he is editing Pro Res or R3D files. If it is 4K of h.264 at 120-200 mbps he should be OK with one drive although 2 striped together wouldn’t hurt.

[Susan Fielding]

I just installed the new 1070 ti… Thank you so much for the recommendation!! I do edit footage directly from the C drive. Is it more efficient to edit from an external drive? I am self-taught and was not aware of that.

[Todd Perchert]

Definitely. The C Drive is doing so much behind the scenes with apps, paging information between the drive and RAM, and a whole lot more. Best to edit from a dedicated drive. And don’t forget backups. If you’re hard drive failed, could you do without any of your video projects/media?
TC

[Susan Fielding]

I have backups for the backups of my backups… lol. But I did not realize how much I am bogging down my C drive, Makes perfect sense though!! Do you have a recommendation for a dedicated drive just to edit from? Also, thank you again!! If it weren’t for kind people such as yourself, I’d be so lost!!

[Todd Perchert]

There are a lot of opinions about this. Depends on your computer – what sort of connections you may have cards that can plug in, workflow, what kinds of files you usually work with, and how much media you typically work with.
My guess, if you are working on your C drive now, an external usb3 drive may be fine.
You could also look at external RAID 5 or 6. These will cost more, and you’ll probably need a PCIe card, but will have better performance and data protection.
Good Luck!
TC