Xeon E5-2650 + Quadro 4000 for 4K editing in Premiere?

Report · Jul 02, 2017

Hi guys, video editing noob here,

so I'm looking for a rig capable of adequate 4K video editing in Premiere Pro/After Effects, and while I've done some reading online, I'm on a time-sensitive mission here, so I decided to ask you guys for some good advice!

From what I gather from reading online, Premiere benefits more from processors with more cores, so one of the builds I'm looking at is this:

Intel Xeon E5-2650 (2.0/2.8GHz, 20M)
Nvidia Quadro 4000
32 GB DDR3 ECC

Now, as far as I can tell, this is not the Quadro P/K 4000, but the older 2GB model. I can currently get this for $992, but am not sure whether that's a good price for what I'm getting. I'm also a bit worried about the RAM not being fast enough. The GPU can be replaced with something more powerful, but do you guys think this system is a good idea for Premiere Pro to begin with? I can also get a 2x Xeon E5-2620 / 64GB RAM but I think this may be a bit of an overkill.

Or should I just go for an i7 instead? Something like this maybe:

Intel Core i7-5820K (3.30GHz)
2x16GB DDR4 2666 Kingston HyperX Savage
Palit GeForce GTX 1060 6GB StormX

This one comes to about $1250 (not including anything else but the components listed above), which I can afford in this case, but I don't really want to go over, say, $1400.

I recently tried working on a 4K project on an Asus FX502VM-DM310 (i7-7700HQ, 16GB DDR4 RAM /2x 8192MB/, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060), and although it fared much, much better than my current PC, it was still a chore working with After Effects compositions. And yeah, it's a laptop. I'm still on the fence whether I should use AE at all in my work, but that's a different story. I'm fully aware that online 4K editing is a tough (and expensive) task, so I don't mind using proxies, but adding a simple lower thirds element in AE slows down things so, so much, both when previewing that certain clip and when rendering afterwards.

I am also open to suggestions for different builds in the vicinity of $1000 to $1300. Thanks!

Report · Jul 02, 2017

forget the old xeon's, they won't be good for 4k. quadro cards are only good for 10bit display, otherwise they aren't needed. the 6 core i7's would be decent options, but a full build might go past your budget. intel also has new cpu's coming out soon, on the x299 platform. if you want the best value you might look at the amd ryzen 6-8 core cpu's. they are slightly slower than their intel counterparts, but also much more affordable to fit a full build in your budget.