pc CHOICE

[John5CB5]

I JUST PURCHASED A 

Lenovo - IdeaCentre 5i Desktop - Intel Core i3 - 8GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive 

THE GRAPHICS SPECS SIMPLY SAY    "Intel UHD Graphics:"

SPACIFICALLY FOR PREMIERE PRO. WILL THIS PC WORK FOR  PRO

[Jeff Bugbee]

This is an on board graphics card. Premiere might work but it will not be ideal.

[John5CB5]

ANY SUGGESTIONS IN THE 500 - 700 DOLLAR CATEGORY FOR PREMIERE PRO

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi John,

I would go for an iMac Mini. That's in the range. Greatest bang for buck in a long time.

Kevin

[Peru Bob]

Moved to the Video Hardware forum.

[John T Smith]

https://community.adobe.com/t5/video-hardware/premiere-pro-hardware-articles-to-read-before-you-buy-...

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

Although that prebuilt desktop has an OK CPU (an Intel i3-10100 with 4 cores and 8 threads), there are a few drawbacks to that PC:

• It has too little total system RAM for Premiere Pro. You see, the default (stock) Windows 10 installation, plus all of the system's required hardware drivers, eat up more than 4 GB of that RAM. That leaves only about 3.75 GB of RAM total available for other programs and the Intel UHD Graphics 630's IGP's portion of the shared RAM! And the IGP eats up a large chunk of that 3.75 GB! This will force the rest of the system to utilize the HDD very heavily for paged memory.
• Speaking of the HDD, it is extremely slow compared to SSDs (Solid State Drives). That HDD may be only a 5400 RPM unit that cannot sustain even 150 MB/s sequentially.
• The Intel UHD Graphics 630 is OK for QuickSync hardware decoding and encoding, but little else. It is nowhere near as powerful as even a cheapo discrete GPU for rendering in MPE (Mercury Playback Engine).

Put them all together, and that IdeaCentre 5i will choke (performance-wise) on anything above about 720p. It definitely needs more RAM, a faster OS disk (such as an SSD) and at least one additional SSD in order to work with even 1080p material adequately. And IMHO if a system requires three or more hardware upgrades just to perform adequately, it is a "Don't Buy" in my book.