What can I upgrade to improve video editing/rendering & Photoshop?

I would upgrade your CPU/MB/RAM, something such as Ryzen 5 or 7 would probably be a good upgrade for editing/rendering.

If you want to use your current parts then I'd look into a used 4770K or 4790K and upgrade your RAM to 2x8gb (16gb total).

Photoshop is a memory hog. 8 GB is enough for basic editing, but once you start making lots of layers or editing the larger photos from newer cameras, you really need 16 GB. I'm kinda curious why you're getting that error. Photoshop uses its own scratch disk instead of the pagefile when it runs out of RAM. Maybe the disk it's on is full or you've somehow disabled it? Try following the instructions here for setting up the scratch disk.

http://blogs.adobe.com/crawlspace/2011/05/how-to-tune-photoshop-cs5-for-peak-performance.html

There's no point getting memory which is faster than what's already installed. Your motherboard will just use all the memory modules at the speed of the slowest module. So if you try to use 1600 MHz and 2133 MHz modules together, the 2133 MHz modules will just be clocked down to 1600 MHz.

I'm kinda reluctant to suggest upgrading to a newer CPU since that would require a new motherboard and RAM. Your system isn't that old and is fairly nice, so I'm not sure you'd see that big an improvement from such an expensive upgrade. You could upgrade to an i7 compatible with your motherboard, but even older i7s tend to be pretty pricey. That said, video rendering is one of the few tasks which do benefit significantly from the hyperthreading on the i7. Not twice the speed like Intel would like you to believe. But it's not unrealistic to expect a 30%-50% speedup.

Considering you need more memory and a better CPU you might as well do a full paltform upgrade. Only reason to stay in current platform is if you find a really good price on used 4th gen i7.

Bexx,

The most serious performance deficit with your current system is that the i5 4690k is non-hyperthreading- the system has 4-cores and 4-threads. Video editing is one of the few applications that can use many CPU cores- CPU single-image rendering is the other. Premiere Pro CS6 is reasonably multi-threaded- at it's most efficient using 5-6 cores and using a hyper-threaded 6 or 8-core CPU could reduce video processing time to 1/4.

For comparison, the i5-4690K average CPU rating = 7755 and the Single Thread Mark = 2236.

unlike 3D applications, in video editing, the single thread performance is not as important as the calculation density- how many total clock cycles per second.

The various memory parameters are also important in rendering /processing. I have a HP z420 6-core, 4GHz workstation that failed on single image renderings (VRay) even with 32GB of DDR3-1866. II transferred that rendering to a 16-core system with 64Gb and discovered that during setup, that single 3180 X 2150 image needed 37.1GB of RAM and then rendered on 18.7GB. Last week I built an 8-core, 4.1GHz, 64GB DDR3-1866 system and although 3D modeling is the most important use, one of the programs that system will be running is Premiere CS6.

How about this as an upgrade:

HP WorkStation Z420 Xeon E5-1650 v2 3.5GHz 250GB HDD+128GB SSD 8GB Mid-Tower > $549 or offer

For comparison, the E5-1650 v2 average CPU rating = 12627 and the Single Thread Mark = 1964.

The Xeon E5-1650 is 6 core /12 thread # 3.5 /3.9GHz and supports 256GB of DDR3-1866 ECC. The greater number of threads and much better memory bandwidth: 59.7GB/s instead of 25.6GHz and RAM capacity will provide a whole new level of performance. Also, workstations are designed to run on very long, continuous, high load applications. I lent a dual processor Dell Precision to an aerospace engineer friend and that ran flight dynamic problems that each ran for up to two days with all 12cores /24 threads at 100%.

To the above system change the RAM to 4X 8GB DDR3-1866 ECC unbuffered with the idea to be able to add another 32GB in future.

As for used CPU's, you're using one right now! The Xeon E5's are rated for 170,000 hours MTBF or 19+ years continuous running/

Cheers,

BambiBoom

HP z620_2 > Xeon E5-1680 v2 (8-core@ 4.1GHz) / 64GB DDR3-1866 ECC Reg / Quadro P2000/ HP Z Turbo Drive M.2 256GB + Intel 730 480GB + Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB / ASUS Essence STX PCIe sound card /825W PSU / Windows 7 Prof. 64-bit > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H (2560 X 1440)

Passmark Rating = 6166 / CPU rating = 16934 / 2D = 820 / 3D= 8849 / Mem = 2991 / Disk = 13794] 4.24.17 Single Thread Mark = 2252