My editing workstation has slowed to a crawl with the latest release(s) which has triggered some hard thinking about how to move forward. I just do volunteer shooting/editing so $2500 for new hardware plus my (I am guessing $800?/yr) Adobe fee, I am not sure at the ripe old age of 71 this is how I want to spend my money.
I was looking for a cheap upgrade so I decided to try a MSI Refurbed gaming box from Woot. 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060, Ryzen 7700 processor. It was less than 1/2 what I would pay for an HP Workstation machine. What am I missing? Aside for a somewhat cheesy build quality is there a downside to going with one of these "gaming machines?"
If it matters to you, a 'gaming' computer will usually only have one hard drive (either platter or SSD) while an 'editing' computer will often have 2 or more drive to spread the load and make file access faster (I built my own desktop, so I have 3 SSD drives)
I know that MSI makes/sells video cards... I have zero knowledge of their computers
As to drives, I am mainly looking for drive bays because I segregate data to non-boot drives and I will be moving 2 disks from the old unit to the new. FYI - I saw complaints from users that the new Dell workstations didn't have any standard drive bays.
I would expect that MSI tower as configured to handle short format 2160p H264 okay and short format 2160p ProRes (or any mezzanine format) fairly well. For long format work, I would use the Proxy workflow. For multi-cam, I would use proxies as well. With 32GB of RAM, I would slant work towrd shorter projects and plan to quit or not actively use other applications when moving between Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. If creating alternate aspect ratio versions of edits (so, after locking a 16:9 edit creating a 1:1 and/or 9:16 version), I would be sure to benchmark one or two projects to have a realistic idea of how long that takes to render.
I think this is getting a little off track. I already purchased the machine in the link so for better or worse I will be trying to use a gaming machine to do Premiere.
I was seeking general commentary on the idea of using a so-called "Gaming Box" instead of a much more expensive "Workstation." I have owned one of these (an emergency Costco buy) but never used it for Adobe stuff. Although the Ryzen is not the ideal processor, this particular unit has a lot of the basics: memory, cores, GPU for much less than the HP I priced out (no more Dells for me). It has liquid cooling which means it can theoretically be overclocked.
I wrote about the GENERAL differences... since you bought the computer you may now open the side to see if there is space in that box to add more internal drives... and check the size of the power supply to be sure it will have enough power for added drives
It had at least 3 bays and a beefy power supply. The thing is a tank but it seems to perform and was easy to set-up. The hardest part of the set-up was getting the SATA data disk out of the old Dell Workstation.
/t5/video-hardware-discussions/inexpensive-hardware-replacement-platform/m-p/15560570#M20455Oct 23, 2025
Oct 23, 2025
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I apologize for the late response. But yes, it will handle FHD (1080p) workflows, as well as shorter-form 4k workflows.
Just two more upgrades to that system would make it an all-around 4k video editing workstation: The RAM and the GPU. 32 GB is fine for shorter-form 4k workflows, but I would bump the RAM amount to 64 GB or 96 GB, as well as replacing that 8 GB GPU (remember, the RTX 4060 only comes in an 8 GB version) with one that has 12 or more GB of VRAM, for general 4k workflows.
And since you already have the system, I would make the upgrades only when necessary.
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