Question Looking to upgrade my pc for more video and photo editing with light gaming.

[fuzmaster]

I kindly request your advice on optimizing my PC for seamless performance with Adobe Lightroom Classic, Premiere Pro, and After Effects, as I have been experiencing performance constraints. Here's a breakdown of my current setup:
System Configuration:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, a 6-core CPU with a base clock of 3.8 GHz
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 GAMING X (ATX)
• Memory: 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600
• Graphics Card: MSI GTX 1660 Ti (6GB GDDR6)
• Storage:
  • 480GB SSD for cache files
  • 1TB NVMe SSD for programs and games
  • 2TB Samsung 870 QVO SSD for project files

When working with 4K video rendering and managing large files in Lightroom and After Effects, my system slows down noticeably, especially during real-time playback and exporting in Premiere Pro. Despite actively managing the media cache and optimizing playback quality, these delays are impacting my workflow.

Upgrade Considerations:

• Upgrading the graphics card to either the RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT for enhanced GPU-accelerated effects and rendering. I understand that a more powerful GPU can significantly improve performance in video editing and rendering.
• Upgrading the overall system to a more capable CPU platform, while retaining my current 32GB of RAM. A more powerful CPU should provide smoother video editing and multitasking performance.
• Reorganizing my storage configuration to separate active projects from backup and archival files. This could involve adding additional storage or implementing a more efficient storage management strategy.

Questions:

1. Is upgrading to the RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT a worthwhile step, or are there other GPUs that might be better suited for my needs?
2. What other upgrades should I consider, given that I am considering a CPU upgrade as well?
3. Is it advisable to reorganize my storage configuration for better performance?

I would greatly appreciate any advice or insights from the community, especially if you have experience in tackling similar performance issues in Adobe creative workflows. I look forward to hearing your suggestions!

 

[NedSmelly]

Lightroom is a weird one. It doesn’t scale linearly with a single upgrade as it bottlenecks in different areas depending on the task. Really annoying.

But looking at your specs, I’d probably upgrade the CPU first. Probably a 5800X or 5900X. Imports and preview generation are mostly CPU limited. Don’t bother with X3D variant, it’s actually a tiny bit slower than non-3D for editing.

GPU upgrade will benefit the video editors more than Lightroom. Extra VRAM will help with 4K edits; rule of thumb for VRAM is minimum 4GB for 1080p, 8GB for 4K, and 20GB for 8K.

You seem to be doing all the right things already with your storage configuration. But yes you can never have enough capacity when it comes to media editing.

Check resource manager and task manager to see if you’re hitting memory capacity and page file (and Adobe programs for using scratch disk). That will tell you if you need more RAM.

 

[Why_Me]

https://www.amd.com/en/product/11826

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/JmhFf7/amd-ryzen-7-5700x-34-ghz-8-core-processor-100-100000926wof

 

[fuzmaster]

These are all great suggestions, I have a very dumb question though, how would I upgrade my bios? Also would this be a sufficient video card for video editing (I use after effects quite a bit as well and would like to learn blender at some point) https://www.amazon.com/MSI-GeForce-RTX-3060-12G/dp/B08WPRMVWB/

 

[NedSmelly]

Also would this be a sufficient video card for video editing (I use after effects quite a bit as well and would like to learn blender at some point) https://www.amazon.com/MSI-GeForce-RTX-3060-12G/dp/B08WPRMVWB/

After Effects Multi-Frame Rendering GPU Performance Analysis

Multi-Frame Rendering is making its way into Adobe After Effects, often giving a 2-4x boost to performance with its greatly improved multi-threading capability. But while this will make higher core count processors more effective, how will it affect GPU performance?

www.pugetsystems.com