Recommend Windows PC spec for 4 10 bit editing

[gsxr1paul]

Hi All,

Looking for some advice / suggestions for PC specs so i can edit 4k 4:2:2 10 bit video. It's beed a while since i did some editing, so not sure if my PC is up to scratch?

My current pc spec:

HDD: 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD SATA-III, Read 525MB/s, Write 500MB/s - Silent
Processor: Intel Core i7 3930K Unlocked (6 x 3.2 GHZ)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 (Intel X79)
Ram: Corsair Vengeance 32GB XMS3 PC3-12800 1600MHz  (DDR3)

Geforce GTX 980 Ti graphics card

Would the above specs be able to handle 4k 10bit video or would i need to upgrade? If not, could anyone suggest a minimum spec for smooth editing?

Any help will be much appreciated!

Thanks

Paul

[David Arbor]

That PC would have serious problems handling 4K 10-bit footage at full resolution, if it would do anything at all. You could work with proxies as a starter, but that GPU is very old and the CPU is even older—over a decade. If you want to do serious work with this kind of footage, you would need to upgrade your entire machine. You didn't specify whether you had fast external storage, but your interal drive isn't big enough to accomodate an OS, apps, and much footage at all. 

[RjL190365]

I agree with David arbor. That old PC cannot handle 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 footage even modestly, if at all. The CPU, while fairly powerful a decade ago, is actually weaker (performance-wise) than even very recent budget CPUs, let alone today's monsters. And the GTX 980 Ti's implementation of NVDEC is restricted to 8-bit 4:2:0 H.264 AVC only. That particular GPU cannot handle HEVC playback at all, instead sending all HEVC decoding to the already obsolete and underperformance CPU.

And to finish it off, the PC's performance (as measured by the PugetBench Premiere Pro benchmark) is only about equal to that of a budget laptop of today that's equipped with a quad-core low-power CPU.

[R Neil Haugen]

Even if you don't buy from them, going to Puget System's website is a great source, as they test all hardware combinations across all the video post apps. So you can select the apps that you use, and see what they recommend at different price levels for those specific apps.

I just had them build me a machine a year ago. 24 core Ryzen 3960x, 128GB of RAM, 2080Ti GPU, two internal Nvme drives, one for OS/programs, the other for all cache files, and eight other internal SSDs besides two massive 'storage' internal HDDs.

Works beautifully in both Pr and Resolve, as well as pretty hot with AE and Audition.

Neil