Each week we tap into the collective knowledge of the Tom's Hardware community to find the answers to our most pressing questions. This week we want to know how you would build a powerhouse Adobe Premiere PC.
It’s no secret that we love video at Tom’s Hardware. You may have noticed an increasing number of videos published to the site over the past few years. Whether it’s an in depth dive into our RGBeast Build or the thousands of tutorials we feature in our community, video content is a crucial part of our workflow and creative process.
With that in mind, we wanted to find out what it takes to build an affordable (that is less than roughly $2,000/£2000), but professional, video editing rig. While we are posing this question to the community, I also wanted to take a stab at the parts list to see what I could come up with.
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I had to spec out a video editing build. We produce almost all of our video content using Adobe Premiere, and so I wanted to center my parts list around this program. In my research, I was surprised to find that video editing is no longer entirely reliant on the CPU, and requires a pretty hefty graphics card these days. Storage is another prime consideration in this build. I needed to balance the needs of storage size and storage speed.
At Tom’s Hardware, we strongly encourage our users to only purchase SSDs, and this build is no exception. While the space may be limited in comparison to a hard disk based storage system, most files these days are stored in the cloud. Two terabytes should be enough to handle a handful of projects at a time, with the rest archived online. With all of that said I’m pretty happy with this 4K capable Premiere build.
| Case | NZXT H500i (White) ATX Mid Tower | $100 |
| Cooling | NZXT Kraken X62 Rev 2 98.17 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler | $139 |
| CPU | AMD Threadripper 2920X 3.5 GHz 12-Core | $650 |
| Graphics | Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8GB Windforce | $492 |
| Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws V 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-3000 | Row 4 - Cell 2 |
| Motherboard | ASRock X399 Taichi ATX TR4 | $325 |
| PSU | SeaSonic Focus Plus Platinum 650 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX | $108 |
| Storage | Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 | $96 |
| Storage | Crucial MX500 1 TB 2.5" | $135 |
| Storage | Crucial MX500 1 TB 2.5" | $135 |
| Total Build Cost | $2,180 |
Threadripper proves to be a tremendous value for workstation tasks. Just keep in mind that with great power comes great wattage, and a high TDP, which is why I went with the NZXT Kraken X62 AIO CPU cooler. Up next was the RAM, and 64 GB of quad channel memory should serve us well on the X399 platform. Tying it all together is the power supply, which is an impressively nimble 650 watt 80+ Platinum Certified PSU from Seasonic.
I’ve shown you mine, now let’s see yours. How would you change this build? Is anything missing? Let us know in the comments below.
Cover image credit: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock
