Inspiring

Question

Inexpensive Hardware Replacement Platform

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
September 28, 2025
5 replies
260 views

My editing workstation has slowed to a crawl with the latest release(s) which has triggered some hard thinking about how to move forward. I just do volunteer shooting/editing so $2500 for new hardware plus my (I am guessing $800?/yr) Adobe fee, I am not sure at the ripe old age of 71 this is how I want to spend my money.

I was looking for a cheap upgrade so I decided to try a MSI Refurbed gaming box from Woot. 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060, Ryzen 7700 processor. It was less than 1/2 what I would pay for an HP Workstation machine. What am I missing? Aside for a somewhat cheesy build quality is there a downside to going with one of these "gaming machines?"

R

RjL190365

Legend

I apologize for the late response. But yes, it will handle FHD (1080p) workflows, as well as shorter-form 4k workflows.

Just two more upgrades to that system would make it an all-around 4k video editing workstation: The RAM and the GPU. 32 GB is fine for shorter-form 4k workflows, but I would bump the RAM amount to 64 GB or 96 GB, as well as replacing that 8 GB GPU (remember, the RTX 4060 only comes in an 8 GB version) with one that has 12 or more GB of VRAM, for general 4k workflows.

And since you already have the system, I would make the upgrades only when necessary.

W

Warren Heaton at CBS

Participating Frequently

What are your delivery settings for your projects? For example, 1080p24 H264 or 1080i29.97 ProRes HQ?

What does your source footage consiste of? For example, 2160p24 H265 iPhone footage or 1080p30 AVCHD and still images?

What's typical duration of a Timeline? For example, a few minute or an hour and a half?

Have you had a chance to go over the Premiere Pro Proxy Workflow?

J

John EllenbergerAuthor

Inspiring

I think this is getting a little off track. I already purchased the machine in the link so for better or worse I will be trying to use a gaming machine to do Premiere.

I was seeking general commentary on the idea of using a so-called "Gaming Box" instead of a much more expensive "Workstation." I have owned one of these (an emergency Costco buy) but never used it for Adobe stuff. Although the Ryzen is not the ideal processor, this particular unit has a lot of the basics: memory, cores, GPU for much less than the HP I priced out (no more Dells for me). It has liquid cooling which means it can theoretically be overclocked.

John T Smith

Community Expert

> I already purchased the machine

I wrote about the GENERAL differences... since you bought the computer you may now open the side to see if there is space in that box to add more internal drives... and check the size of the power supply to be sure it will have enough power for added drives

Power Supply Size https://www.newegg.com/tools/power-supply-calculator/

Peru Bob

Community Expert

@RjL190365

Peru Bob

Community Expert

What are the full specs of that MSI?

J

John EllenbergerAuthor

Inspiring

Here is the Woot listing: MSI AEGIS Z2 C7NUC-1207US Desktop PC, AMD Ryzen 7 7700, 32GB DDR5, 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060, Windows 11 Home

As to drives, I am mainly looking for drive bays because I segregate data to non-boot drives and I will be moving 2 disks from the old unit to the new. FYI - I saw complaints from users that the new Dell workstations didn't have any standard drive bays.

Warren Heaton

Community Expert

@John Ellenberger

I would expect that MSI tower as configured to handle short format 2160p H264 okay and short format 2160p ProRes (or any mezzanine format) fairly well. For long format work, I would use the Proxy workflow. For multi-cam, I would use proxies as well. With 32GB of RAM, I would slant work towrd shorter projects and plan to quit or not actively use other applications when moving between Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. If creating alternate aspect ratio versions of edits (so, after locking a 16:9 edit creating a 1:1 and/or 9:16 version), I would be sure to benchmark one or two projects to have a realistic idea of how long that takes to render.

- Warren

John T Smith

Community Expert

If it matters to you, a 'gaming' computer will usually only have one hard drive (either platter or SSD) while an 'editing' computer will often have 2 or more drive to spread the load and make file access faster (I built my own desktop, so I have 3 SSD drives)

I know that MSI makes/sells video cards... I have zero knowledge of their computers

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