Is my computer too slow to run Premiere effectively?

[CELERYWOOF]

Hi all,

Please don't point me to the Adobe page for minimum system requirements.  I'm not looking for a computer that will just minimally run the software.  I want performance to be reasonably acceptable.

I bought a laptop about three years ago, and while I'm sure you're thinking that 3 years is a long time, it doesn't seem (from my perhaps non-techie view) that specs have gotten a lot better since then.   I have 16 GB RAM and an Intel i7 processor, and the top laptops nowadays still come with 16 GB of RAM and an i7.

However, the Adobe Creative Cloud software products (Lightroom Photoshop CC) have started to get slower on my computer and I don't know if it's because my hardware is insufficient, or some other reason.  I've used some "cleaner" software like Revo uninstaller to get rid of junk, so I think the computer is relatively clean.

I'm starting to do more video work, but before I buy Premiere, I would like real-world opinions on whether I need a new laptop or not (I'm not considering a desktop at this time).

This is my computer:

Amazon.com: Dell Inspiron i5547-15001sLV 15.6-Inch Touchscreen Laptop [Discontinued By Manufacturer]...

Windows 8.1 64 bit

Intel Core i7-4510U CPU @2.00GHz 2.60 GHz  (Windows lists two different speeds; I don't know why)

16 MB RAM

1 TB Hard Drive (it's not full; at 70% capacity)

Graphics card: AMD Radion R7 M265

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

I'd recommend that you save up for a new laptop:

That i7-4510U and all other i7 U-series CPUs up to and including the 7th Generation models are only dual-core, not quad-core. And all hard drives start to slow down in sequential transfer speeds substantially once you get past 55 to 60 percent full. And the GPU is not only old and outdated (its architecture and process dates all the way back six years, to the beginning of 2012) but also a weakling (only 64-bit DDR3 graphics RAM with an extremely poor throughput, and only 384 TMUs whereas the GPUs that we've been generally recommending have well over 600 TMUs).

[CELERYWOOF]

Thank you for your input and telling me what to look for!

Would this be significantly better or do you think it would still struggle a bit running current Adobe CC software?

Lenovo Laptops,ideapad Y700 (15"),Model:80NW0035US

Core i7-6700HQ (4C, 2.6 / 3.5GHz, 6MB)

16 GB RAM

1TB 5400rpm + 256GB SSD M.2 PCIe

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4GB GDDR5

This one is one of very few that meet what I'm looking for when I did a search on Amazon, but one of my concerns is that it was released a year ago (Jan 2017) so I'm buying a one-year old model already.  It has a 4-core processor, but when I looked up the TMUs, one web site said it has 40.  Maybe that's equivalent to your "400"?

Thank you!

[RjL190365]

Actually, that GTX 960m has 40 TMUs, and each of Maxwell's and Pascal's TMUs have 16 shader processors (or "CUDA cores" in Nvidia-speak). This translates into a total of 640 shader processors for that GPU. However, the GTX 960m is not a true second-generation Maxwell GPU at all - but a first-generation one, itself a variant of the GPU that began life as the GTX 750 Ti back in Spring of 2014.

I corrected myself about the TMUs and ROPs. An ROP directly dictates how.many bits the GPU's memory bus should operate with.

By the way, that R7 M265 has only 384 shader processors, not TMUs. It has only 24 TMUs (with 16 unified processors per TMU) and only 8 ROPs. No wonder why it's performance is so lousy.