Upgrade computer to handle After Effects better?

[DVMorales]

I am trying to upgrade my system to handle both Adobe Premiere and After Effects better, but I am on a budget. Presently it gets choppy when I scroll through HD and 4K footage in Premiere. I want it to run smoothly, and I can make do with long render times.

My specs:

MOTHERBOARD: ASUSTek M5A97 R2.0

CPU: AMD FX-8350

RAM: 16 GB DDR3 G-SKILL Sniper

GRAPHICS: 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

OPTICAL DRIVE: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-224DB

PSU: Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus 700W

COOLING FAN: Cryorig H7

CASE: Rosewill Challenger Mid Tower

HARD DRIVE: Seagate 1TB - ST1000DM003-1CH162

What's gonna make my computer run:

• Adobe Premiere Pro

• Adobe After Effects

with lag-free 4K footage for about $300 - $500 more than I have already spent?

[Mylenium]

Well, the obvious answer would be that you need to get much faster harddrives. A single platter-based drive isn't going to be able to give the necessary data rates. There could be other issues just as well, though. I have this ugly feeling that your rig may simply be put together less than ideally and there's also something limiting the PCI transfer rates. Hard to tell from abstract specs...

Mylenium

[imeilfx]

As Mylenium said - you need faster drive or several of them - for now that is probably your bottleneck. Now you have one HDD thast runs at the same time:
- your OS
- your After Effects/Premiere Pro
- your source footage that you use in projects
- your cache files 
- and during render - it saves your rendered files onto the same drive
- also if you run your webbrowser or other apps at hte same time - it also uses that one HDD
That is only one layer disc and one laser that have to gain phisical access to all of those things almost at the same time

It would be best to invest into some good quality SSD drives with decent speeds (for OS, cache etc.)  and use that what you have (1 TB HDD) as a Archive/ footage drive. 

[Martin_Ritter]

For the best running system, you'll need a more recent CPU, like i7 or i9, maybe Threadripper. Next, AE would benefit of an upgrade to 32 or even 64 GB of RAM. Upgrading those require a new Mainboard, which would be a benefit, too (PCIe 3 or 4, NVMe drives port).

But since you are on a budget, I agree with @Mylenium. Get a Sata SSD. That is all you can do right now.

*Martin

[Sébastien Périer]

On top of the SDD suggestions there, I'd also suggest a more modern GPU, especially if you want to work in 4k.

GTX960 is even below the minimal requirement for Premiere. You should consider upgrading at least to a Gtx1070.

[DVMorales]

Thank you all for the advice, I took it into account and ordered increased RAM (to 32 GB), an AMD Ryzen 7 Processor, and an SSD.

[imeilfx]

Wait. If I'm not mistaken - Im not daily AMD user - but AMD Ryzen 7 is on AM4 socket and your otherboard is AM3+ so if that is the case - to be able to use Ryzen 7 CPU you will need also buy a new motherboard.

[DVMorales]

Yep, good catch. I had bought one.