Help plz-Optimize Mac Book Pro Retina mid-2012 for Premier and After Effects

We are a small agency with 4 Mac Book Pro workstations running Adobe CC. The machines are mid-2012 15" Retina machines running El Cap and have max ram installed. We are doing more and more projects in Premier Pro and After Effects and are looking to optimize the machines and Adobe CC versions to best work in our environment.

Our latest issue occurs when trying to render in After Effects using the CC Media Encoder. We are getting error code 1609629695. In doing online searches for this problem, a host of solutions presented themselves which we are pursuing to see if any actually fix this issue. Several of the thread speak to recent updates causing problems and the solution being to revert to older versions.

My question: Is there a list of CC versions, driver versions, etc that we should not upgrade beyond given our hardware limitations? And to follow that, are there best practices when it comes to settings in the Mac OS and/or withing Premier and After Effects that maximize use of our hardware?

I know this is a rather open ended question but we need to keep this hardware working for another year or so until we upgrade to the newest coolest stuff!

Thanks,

Bri