Hardware build advice needed.

[Bare Bones Tek]

Hi,

OK, so I'm new to this forum, so if I'm in the wrong place, please redirect me.

I am building a new PC and anticipate AE to be a growing part of my daily workflow (along with Premiere Pro and Audition but less so those products.)

I have found quite a lot of online discussions about what helps / is a waste of money when building for Premiere Pro, but less so for After Effects. Also, I know times move on and what was not important 1 or 2 years ago may be critical in 2022. (E.G. How much use do the products make of the GPU?)

So, my question really is, what components have the biggest impact on After Effects performance? Is memory more important than processor? Or is having mutiple M.2 SSDs (so cache is on a dedicated drive) the key? What about GPU?

My current parts list is here but if I wanted to spend an extra, say $100, which component should I throw my money at (also, is there anything there which you think is over-kill?

Please remember, I'm not gaming etc. Other tham M$ office and general web-surfing, the main applications I am building for are After Effects, Premiere Pro and  Audition (in that order of priority / use).

Thoughts?

TIA for all comments.

[jaketr]

The most important component for any productivity applications is the CPU (in my opinion). You've got a decent CPU in there already, but if your budget is $1350, you could go a little better. In my opinion, 64 GB RAM is a little overkill even for AE. Also you are spending too much on a motherboard. I know it's probably the cheapest option for that chip, but you could substitute it out for a Ryzen chip and a cheaper motherboard for roughly the equivalent performance. The GPU could be better. It's really the bottom of the barrel right now in the GPU market, so if you can't find a better alternative, I would recommend either the one you have or a GTX 1660 Super. I think a 1 TB SSD is enough. You can clear your cache after projects anyways. Last, you're going to need a cooler and OS (if you don't already have them)!

I've gone ahead and modified your parts list for you based on my opinion. If you cant' access it, let me know!

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/6HTdH2 (It says compatibility warning, but you should be fine. Just make sure your BIOS is up to date, also I didn't add an OS, but if  you don't have one, you can knock the CPU down to a 5600x to save money. Get Windows 11 Home)

Also, wait for some other people to respond. It's always good to have multiple views.

[Andrew Yoole]

i agree pretty much with the comments above, other than I think 64Gb is quite a reasonable amount of RAM these days, especially if you plan to work in high resolutions like 4K or greater.

In order of importance to your rig:

1 - CPU speed

2 - Fast SSD

3 - RAM

4 - Number of CPU cores

[Bare Bones Tek]

Thank, Both of you!

Following my post, I continued to research and found this recording of a webinar given by Puget systems on this topic, they particularly address my original concern, namely "is the considered wisdom still valid?" and it looks like it isn't, primarily due to the "Multi-Frame Rendering" feature.

Concerning processor choice, a lot of informsation I have found suggests that at the current time Intel beats AMD hands-down. Not only the video I mentioned above, but also reviwers like te YouTuber "Tech Notice" - it's basically down to on-chip GPU capabilities. In addition, AE (apparently) now makes better use of multiple cores, so the old "fewer, but faster cores is better" rule is not quite so universal! Currently, I'm trying to decide between an i5-12400k and an i5-12600k....

Motherboard - simple reason for that choice was that it has 4 NVME M.2 slots - looking at future upgradability / expansion.

Windoze - Yeah, I already have that and, with respect, wouldn't touch an "Home" version and am avoiding 11. In fact, if I could find a suitable alternative to Creative Cloud that ran on Linux, I would go that route! So it's it'll be Windows 10 Pro 😉

Storage - I have given that some thought too and will probably end up with multiple drives (since my motherboard supports it) mainly so I can put Cace on a dedicated drive. (That way, I'm not wasting the OS SSDs built in write-limit. and risking catastrophic failure when I reach it!)

Memory - The more I have, the longer composition I can render to RAM. One of my current issues is that I often animate to a soundtrack, so having it stop / start, or slow down when it runs out is a problem for me. I'm surprised you though I didn't need 64Gb, I half expected you to say that I should consider upping it to 128!! 😮

GPU - I'm not clear on the actual effect this one will have Puget seem to be saying that more vRAM is what matters, so I'm now looking at a slightly better one. Sadly, I don't have an unlimited budget (if I did, I'd just get Puget to build me a system!) but I figure the GPU is something I can (relatively) easily upgrade in the future and probably find a use for the old one (maybe in my media server for transcoding) whereas other components would be harder to re-purpose.

Anyway, all input is useful, so thanks again. I will post back with what I finally end up with and how well it worked out!

[jaketr]

In my personal experience, MFR hasn't really helped. That might be controversial, but I just don't see any improvement. But hey! It might work well for you. 

In general, you are correct that Intel is ahead of AMD in productivity applications, and Intel is still better for Adobe apps, but AMD has seen a rise in performance over the past couple years with the release of the 5000 series. If you add it all up, an Intel chip will cost more price to performance wise. Considering the price of the Alder Lake compatible motherboards. If you still really want to go with Intel, the 12600k is more worthwhile (refer to video linked below).

I'm not that good with RAM judgements, I don't have humongous animations that would require RAM previews. Plus, I have been seeing more increase in RAM suggestions for AE in general. So I guess stick to 64 gigs! 128 if you have the money.

Using a 3050 as a stop gap is gonna be ideal. GPU prices will start to go down soon (hopefully) especially with the 40 series coming soon. 

You're original build is great! But the reason I modified it the way I did is so that every component is at a similar performance level. (Wouldn't make sense to have a G4500 chip with a 3090, would it!).

Check this video out, it really helped me differentiate parts when I built my PC!

https://youtu.be/-EogHCFd7w0 (productivity results start at 5:01)