Troubleshooting My Workstation [Upgrade Needed?]

[Guest_Services_Inc_]

Hello everyone!

I would like to thank anyone in advance for their help. I am the sole video producer for a hospitality company and have a very large creative leash in what I can create but am often bottle-necked by frequent crashes, painful loading times, complete computer lock-ups, and various other issues. I have to believe that professionals who work with this software don't encounter these issues as frequently as I am and I need to pinpoint what might be bottle-necking my rig. I work most commonly with 4K 10-bit footage and use various 2D and 3D effects through after effects and even some other applications such as Maya. My systems specs are listed below, this is the rig our IT department provided for me

System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.

System Model: Precision Tower 5810

System Type: x64-based PC

Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 v3 @ 3.50GHz 3.5 GHz

Graphics Card: (2) Nvidia Quadro M4000

Hard Drive: ATA ST2000DM001-1ER1 SCSI Disk Device

Ram: 16gb

The first thing that I can see might be causing these issues is my hard drive, would purchasing a solid state with enough storage be the best solution or are their additional issues/solutions?

Thank you again to anyone who can help, my boss has already given me approval to make any purchase I deem fit and I really jsut want to be able to do my job without my computer holding me back so again I really appreciate the help. I will also be glad to answer any additional questions to help pinpoint this issue.

[Guest_Services_Inc_]

Additionally, as much as I support the idea of building a pc myself, the company would strongly insist we bought a pre-built computer so if there are any recommendations for a new pre-built rig I would love feedback

[Peru Bob]

jenniferg62416471  wrote

Additionally, as much as I support the idea of building a pc myself, the company would strongly insist we bought a pre-built computer so if there are any recommendations for a new pre-built rig I would love feedback

I've purchased two systems from them:

ADK Video Editing | Professional Video NLE Workstations, Pro Video Gear and Video Software

Give them a call and see what they would recommend for you.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Good suggestion

[Guest_Services_Inc_]

Awesome, thanks!

[Bill_Gehrke]

1. That is only a four core Xeon with not much more power than my laptop. 
2. The single hard disk drive is below minimum requirements
3. This day and age for Premiere Pro you should have one SATA III SSD for the OS and Applications, then one super speed M.2 SSD like a Samsung 960 Pro or (second choice) EVO for your projects and media.  Hard disk drives are only good for backup and archiving/
4. If you want to demonstrate how your your system performs you might want to look at my Premiere Pro BenchMark (PPBM) and test your system.  After you download and unzip PPBM there are four tests, one for the storage disk system and two tests for the GPU, and one for the CPU only.  On that same site you can see results from many other systems.
5. I will try to comment back to you on your results.
6. I bet that Dell has many unnecessary processes running on that computer look at the performance tab of Task Manager, how many processes?

[Guest_Services_Inc_]

Bill, thank you so much for the in depth reply and information. This is exactly the kind of additional information I need to be able to justify my purchase outside of our departments specifications. I am out of the office until Monday but I will try to follow up with the results as soon as possible.

Thanks again!

[RoninEdits]

premiere works differently than AE, maya, and other software, so be careful chasing premiere performance advice/guides if you are using other software. AE (and i think Maya) often only use 2-4 cpu cores, while premiere and some other software can use more. if AE and maya are your primary programs then you might focus on upgrading the current computer by adding some sata ssd's for an os drive, scratch drive, and media/projects drive, and more ram to at least 32gb. its likely the computer could also run a pcie m.2 ssd with a pcie adapter if you wanted to go that route.

if you wanted to increase the cpu performance the newer intel i7 4 core cpu's have higher clock speeds, 4.2ghz base and 4.5ghz turbo. which will make them around 10-20% faster, but also require a new computer or motherboard (and one capable of running two video cards). 6-8 core cpu's can offer more performance in some software like premiere, but those cpu's also have lower clock speeds which will hurt performance in software like AE, photoshop, etc.

i would have the IT dept look over the computer to see if they can find out why its locking up and crashing. if they don't find anything wrong, then you might ask them to do a clean install of windows or revert to factory state. which might fix software issues but you would also have to reinstall your software. you would also need backups of your files before they do that.