Computer Advice

If the problem is that the Mac “can’t really handle the newer stuff,” one thing about the new stuff is that a lot of it works best on computers made in the last 2 or 3 years. And although that has always been somewhat the case, it is much more true today: The latest features in several Creative Cloud apps rely heavily on having lots of CPU cores and a powerful GPU that is known effective for accelerating AI processing. After Effects is particularly demanding of the CPU.

Unfortunately those all work against a computer designed in 2015, almost a decade ago. Computers with components from before 2020 or so are likely to run AI features especially slowly compared to current models.

The Intel i7-5820K has 6 CPU cores, which is OK, kind of…be aware that even the cheapest, bottom end Macs today have 8 CPU cores. At the high end, the Apple M2 Ultra and the latest Intel Core Ultra 9 both have 24 CPU cores. I plugged the Intel i7-5820K into a search engine, and cpubenchmark.net said “This is a fairly old CPU that is no longer competitive with newer CPUs.” It does not sound like this will help After Effects run anywhere close to how it would on a recent computer.

The GPU for that PC is a GTX970 with 4GB VRAM. Although I am mostly a Mac guy, from reading posts here I get the sense that those specs are woefully underpowered for running current versions of After Effects and similar apps. What’s popular are the Nvidia RTX 30x0 or 40x0 series with no less than 8GB VRAM. That GPU level is also known for its Tensor Cores which apparently really help with AI processing. On the Mac side, Creative Cloud graphics acceleration and AI processing are aided by buying an Apple Silicon Mac (do not even look at any Intel Macs today) that has many more GPU cores than a base model, and ordering enough Unified Memory to keep the GPU fed (at least 8GB beyond what you anticipate the OS and apps will need).

The SSDs on that PC are just OK, and are outdated and too small.

It says the M.2 SSD is 600-800MB/sec, which is somewhat low end today. Internal boot volumes on current PCs and Macs typically use NVMe SSDs that can exceed 7000MB/sec (around ten times faster), but you’re probably fine at 2500MB/sec or more. A huge problem is that M.2 SSD is only 128GB…that’s almost nothing, especially since it’s a best practice to assign several hundred GB to the Premiere Pro/After Effects media cache on the fastest available drive, because it’s a performance cache. That makes 500GB a minimal size for the boot volume, with 1TB or more highly preferable.

It says the 1st Storage Drive is only around 550MB/sec. That’s because it’s SATA, the oldest SSD standard that’s still common. Current computers are, again, standardized on the much faster NVMe SSDs, although old SATA is OK for storage of static files. For serious pro video with high resolution media, the ability of NVMe SSDs to read/write many times faster than SATA is essential, and NVMe is now common and affordable.

The 32GB of working memory is fine, that’s what I have in my Mac laptop that runs After Effects. But I don’t use After Effects daily; if I did, I’d have 64GB to give After Effects the room for longer real time previews.

I’m not even talking about bells and whistles…it’s just that the baseline for hardware has gone way up. Now that we’ve had a few years for that to trickle down to lower end models, you don’t necessarily have to buy the top of the line to get decent performance. My mid-range 2021 Apple Silicon MacBook Pro runs Creative Cloud apps smoother than any computer I’ve ever owned, while staying cool and quiet. (Although After Effects really pushes it close to the edge, and it will heat up with that app.) 

Not 100% current, but may help... includes recommendation links from Puget Systems... copied from Peru Bob... NOTE - go to the Puget site to see their CURRENT information
https://community.adobe.com/t5/video-hardware/premiere-pro-hardware-articles-to-read-before-you-buy-or-build/m-p/11557686

Moved from the AE forum to the Video Hardware forum.