Recommended Computer Workstation For Adobe Premiere Pro 2021

Best Workstation For Premiere Pro

Building the perfect Workstation for Premiere Pro can be challenging. This video editing application loved by filmmakers everywhere provides users with feature-rich and user-friendly timeline-based video editing capabilities. Whether you are an enthusiast who wants to edit personal videos taken from a phone or work for a large production film company planning to edit 4/8K video, Premiere Pro is undoubtedly a fantastic option for you.

To optimise a Workstation for Premiere Pro all aspects of the program need to be considered. Different tasks can require completely different kinds of Workstation hardware to maximise performance. Getting to the bottom of this can be a minefield, but we are here to break this down for you so you can find the perfect Adobe Premiere Pro Workstation for your needs and budget.

What is the best CPU for Adobe Premiere Pro?
When working on Adobe Premiere Pro projects and performing actions such as video effects, 2D animation, motion graphics, transitions, colour corrections, and others, these features have around a 6-10 cores limitation. Therefore for these tasks to maximise performance, you want to select a processor with at least ten cores and delivers the fastest per-core clock speed possible.

AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Workstations fit these requirements perfectly. Both options offer the best in class clock speeds from their respective companies and more than enough cores and threads to meet your needs.

However, Premiere Pro can utilise many more cores when exporting videos because this is a truly multi-threaded process. If this is a bottleneck for your workflow, you may consider an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or Intel Core X-Series Workstation platform instead. These systems offer far more cores and threads but sacrifice a little bit of clock speed and therefore editing performance. They may also cost more than their lighter core count cousins.

Best Video Editing Graphics Cards
The Adobe Mercury Playback Engine used by Premiere Pro can leverage the power of your GPU to accelerate certain tasks such as visual effects. Mercury Engine GPU accelerated workflows often support multiple graphics cards enabling you to increase your performance further.

Unfortunately, however, most tasks within Adobe Premiere Pro, such as encoding and outputting your projects, do not benefit from a Graphics Card. Therefore we recommended focusing your budget towards CPU, which will help users the most.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards offer great value for money and are ideal for Premiere Pro users. If you use other applications that need more graphical memory or plan to use multiple graphics cards in your Workstation, we highly recommend the NVIDIA Professional range of graphics cards

How Much Memory (RAM) For Premiere Pro?
Memory requirements for an Adobe Premiere Pro Workstation can vary from project to project and user to user. The length, resolution and codec of source materials are just a few examples of factors that can dramatically change the amount of RAM you may need.

Running other programs such as Adobe After Effects can also heavily impact the amount of RAM you may need. So it is easy to see why RAM usage can quickly increase within video editing workflows, and not having enough will suddenly leave your Workstation feeling sluggish and unresponsive.

For this reason, we recommend to our customers at least 32GB for general 1080p editing, 64GB for 4K, and anything more will require 128GB. Keep in mind what other applications may need, and if you run them simultaneously, you may need to increase your Memory to account for this.

Storage Drive Configuration For a Premiere Pro Workstation
There have been significant developments in storage drive technology in the last few years, meaning you have more choices than ever before. There is no need to feel overwhelmed as these storage drives generally fall into 1 of 3 categories.

* Traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD). They are reliable, cost-effective, and offer very large storage capacities, however, they are by far the slowest storage drive option available today.

* SATA Solid State Drives (SATA SSD). They are significantly faster than an HDD and are an excellent option for installing your Operating System & Applications onto or even as a cache drive. They do not offer as large capacities as an HDD and will cost a bit more.

* NVMe Solid State Drive (NVMe SSD). By far the fastest drive available today and also the most expensive although prices are dropping over time. Installing your Applications, Operating System and storing your active project files on these drives will give you the best performance possible.

For Adobe Premiere Pro Workstations, we recommend 1x (NVMe or SATA) SSD for your Operating System and Applications. Another SSD to store your project files and optionally a 3rd SSD as a cache or scratch drive.

Finally, an optional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device maybe helpful for long term file storage.

Best Workstation For Premiere Pro

Other Ideal Systems For Premiere Pro