Best specs for After Effects / Cinema4D ?

Please refer to the millions of performance-related posts on this forum! What do you even hope to get out of a 12 core Xeon when AE barely uses parallel processing? What do you hope to achieve with an RTX card, wehn it's not even compatible with AE's Raytrace 3D and said feature has been deprecated for several versions now? Likewise, what good would it do when AE's GPU featurtes are extremely limted? For AE none of that makes any sense and in fact performance may be even worse than what you currently have. Whatever issues or slowdowns you have cannot be fixed by throwing expensive hardware at AE. Chances are, the behavior is perfectly normal within how AE works, anyway. First and foremost AE still is reliant on the fastest single/ dual core processor performance and lots of RAM, but even then some effects will just take their sweet good time to process. In any case, since you haven't been specific, we can't advise on how to optimize. It's quite possible that simply investing in some third-party plug-ins with optimized algorithms could do way more for you than wasting money on useless hardware.

Other than that your proposed system would be nice for 3D work, but there's another kink in your plan: You have to have the latest commercial version of C4D, not the free C4D Lite to even use some of the features like GPU accelerated rendering or even rendering on all cores. So unless you invest on that front, upgrading your hardware wouldn't make much sense, either. And even then it becomes a matter of what you actually do. Unless you are doing heavy rendering every day, your Xeon will not have much to do, either. Modeling functions, animation tools or other user-interactive features typically skew towards best single core performance, too, for mathematical reasons.

See, it's not as easy as saying "Shut up and take my money!". So for what it's worth, I would urge you to give it much more thought and do some research on the subject. A balanced out midrange system that handles all scenarios well will be much more useful than an overspecced expensive machine that never can play to its strengths...

Mylenium