- RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING UPGRADE
- RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING PRO
- RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE
- RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING PC
Second, you could build your own, but you’d have to invest a lot of time in choosing parts, unless you follow someone else’s build from PC Partpicker. First, you could buy a desktop PC from one of the major brands such as Dell, HP or Lenovo, in a shop or online. Nvidia’s Quadro workstation graphics cards are powerful workhorses for video processing, but are substantially more expensive than their consumer equivalent GeForce models. In fact, this applies to whole PCs, where some gaming rigs can now compete with workstations. Happily, most people can now use GeForce cards designed for the gaming market, where sales volumes are high and competition drives down prices.
RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING PRO
Historically, the best Quadro cards for running Premiere Pro have been expensive.
RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE
Graphics cards vary from pointless to indispensable, depending on the software you are using, and what you are doing with it. You can write files to a slower device, such as a 1TB or larger hard drive. Project source files should be on the fastest 256GB or larger SSD, preferably M.2. SSDs are fast, but big ones are costly, so it makes sense to have two drives. For beginners, 8GB is the minimum, as long as you can increase it to 16GB or 32GB later.įor storage, you need both speed and space. Video editing also benefits from having lots of memory (RAM) and at least two fast storage devices.įor professional editors, 32GB is not a lot of memory, but it’s the sensible minimum. It’s harder to change the processor, and new Intel CPUs often need new support chips, which means a new motherboard.
RECOMMENDED COMPUTERS FOR VIDEO EDITING UPGRADE
The desktop tower’s other major advantage is that it’s easy to upgrade by adding more memory, storage and better graphics cards. My i5-2500 ran at a TDP of 95W, whereas today’s U-type chips are designed to run at 15W in laptops. For example, the Core i5-2500 processor I bought in 2011 is still slightly faster than a Core i7-8550U or Ryzen 5 2500U from 2017, and probably hammers this month’s 10th-generation Intel Core i7-10510Y. These start slower and may still be throttled for overheating.
By contrast, laptops use special low-power chips designed to generate less heat. Towers have the space and cooling to run hot, fast chips.
If you have room for a desktop tower, it is by far the best choice for video editing. There’s a reason gaming PCs are generally desktops, but they don’t have to be gaudy with flashing lights. I’m all in favour of AMD Ryzens, but Puget Systems’ bench tests show that Intel’s QuickSync gives it the edge for Premiere Pro users. (A 32-core Threadripper is about £1,500 and absolutely not worth the difference.) Something in the top 60 should be OK, bearing in mind that my cheap ( £170) Core i5-8400 is still in 37th place, until Intel’s 10th-generation Comet Lake chips push it down a bit. Something in the top 25 would be great, if you can afford it. Notebookcheck’s comparison of mobile processors provides a rough guide to the relative performance of more than 1,400 processors. From the AMD Zen range, the Ryand 2700X (both 8C/16T) seem to be good value, while the Ryand 2600X (both 6C/12T) offer lots of threads for a low price. The older Core i7-8700K and the classic Core i7-7700 still perform well if you can get them at a discount. The eight-core Intel Core i7-9700 is the first choice at this level. For consumers, eight is a very good number. For most purposes, including video editing and gaming, it’s generally better to have faster cores (more GHz) rather than more slower cores. Today, Intel’s Core i9-9900K and AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X have eight cores and 16 threads, while the Ryzen Threadripper 2 2990WX has 32 cores and 64 threads. Not so long ago, “dual core” chips were a thing, and then we got cores that could run two threads at once. Most people do not need a fast processor most of the time, but when I’m processing videos, all six cores in my Core i5-8400 run at close to 100% for extended periods. Photograph: Intel Corporationīuy the fastest processor you can afford, and in general, the more cores the better.