What Computer should I get?

[zacd]

Hi everyone,

I need a new op, and I'm not willing to spend money on a Mac. Anyone know of a PC that works well with encoding Premiere Pro and running all of the adobe apps at a good speed.

[Bill_Gehrke]

What is you budget?

[zacd]

$300 and preferably a hp computer

[Peru Bob]

Sorry but you will probably have to at least quadruple your budget to get something that is usable with Premiere Pro.

What type of media will you be editing?

You may want to consider Premiere Elements instead, although you will likely have to double or triple your budget for that.

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

You're not going to get anything that can run the latest version(s) of Premiere Pro at all at that budget, especially not a pre-built PC:

1) That new PC for that low will give you a CPU that is actually slower (performance-wise) than a 10-year-old low-end CPU.

2) At that price you will not get enough RAM to run Premiere Pro CC at all. Premiere Pro CC requires a minimum of 8GB (preferably 16GB) of installed RAM to even run at all. You'd be lucky to have even 4GB of RAM - but more than likely you'll have only 2GB of RAM installed.

3) Don't expect an SSD in a PC for that low of a price. Instead, you'll get a hard drive that's glacially slow, especially in random operations.

4) Integrated graphics which may or may not be supported by Premiere's hardware GPU rendering engine are a given. Do not expect a discrete GPU in a PC priced this low.

And all this is due in part to the colossal retreat of AMD from the CPU performance race in recent years. As a result, new CPUs from Intel have crept upwards in price at every given performance grade.