What are the best settings for smooth playback?

[skyportraitsphotography]

I need some help.  I'm at my wits end.  I'm now trying out a 2nd laptop in hopes that it will edit smoother than my older one and its no different.  My laptop is top of the line, 12 gen 12700h, nvideo graphics card 3060, 64 gb of ram, 2 tb ssd.  This thing should be handling 4k footage with no problem but its ridculously slow.  It won't play the timeline without rendering everytime I make a change.  My workflow speed is laughable.  So I tried a different laptop thinking maybe mine is a lemon, NOPE! Same issues, so I'm thinking there has to be some settings in Premiere that I'm missing.  I've assigned the graphics card to premiere and dedicated most of the ram to premiere as well.  I know a laptop isn't going to be as officiant as a desktop but it should absolutely perform better than it is.  Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

[MyerPj]

It might be your media. h.264 is particularly hard on hardware. You could look into Proxy workflow, or transcode your media to something easy on the machine, like Prores LT or even ProRes Proxy. Also, if your footage is variable frame rate, that produces inconsistent results with PP.