Adobe Premiere Pro Workstation Requirements

Adobe Premiere Pro is a very popular video editing suite and it has been around for many years, and as such it brings with it legacy code that has not yet been fully re-written to take advantage of what a modern powerhouse Media PC can deliver in terms of performance.

However, that does not mean you can not put together a really powerful workstation for how Adobe Premiere Pro works now, and for how it will work in the future.

Which Processor to use with Adobe Premiere Pro?

The CPU or Processor is the most important aspect of building a workstation for Adobe Premiere Pro. It is not however a simple matter of throwing as much money as possible at the CPU and you’re good to go. Adobe Premiere Pro will make full use of your CPUs high clock speed to deliver great performance, however more cores does not necessarily mean more performance.

Adobe Premiere Pro’s performance will taper off with ‘too many’ cores, so ultra high core count CPUs like Intel’s Xeon CPUs are not the advantage you may think they are. If budget permits and you want maximum performance then Intel’s X Series CPUs are the way to go.The X Series CPUs are not cheap and one can get close to their performance with the 9900K CPU which while not cheap itself, does offer excellent performance for significantly less money.

Which Graphics Card to use for Adobe Premiere Pro?

Adobe Premiere Pro has over the last few years been making more use of the GPU, not to the same extent as Davinci Resolve however, so the CPU is where you want to put most of your budget. That is not to say a powerful GPU is a waste either, it all depends on the effects you use, and how many of them on a given project.

GPU power is one thing, but we must also consider the amount of VRAM your GPU has, and again that relates to the type of work you do and more importantly what resolutions you work with. The higher the resolution of your projects, the more VRAM you will need. As a rough guide, the amount of VRAM you need for your editing work is as follows:

• 1080P / 4GB VRAM
• 4K / 8GB VRAM
• 8K / 12GB VRAM or more

Given that the GeForce 2080 Ti tops out at 11GB VRAM, you are pretty much forced to use a Quadro GPU if editing 8K video, and the starting point would be the NVIDIA Quadro P5000 with 16GB VRAM.

Currently Adobe Premiere Pro does not make use of the RT and Tensor cores of the modern NVIDIA RTX graphics cards. That may change in the future however so it is not a bad thing to have.

How much RAM does Adobe Premiere Pro require?

The amount of RAM you need is highly dependent on the types of projects you do once again, their resolution and complexity have a significant impact. If you use other programs while using Adobe Premiere Pro, then even more RAM will be required.

Recommendations for your Adobe Premiere Pro system comes down to the resolution of the work you are doing, so if you are working on projects up to 4K, then a minimum 64GB RAM is recommended. If you work with 6/8K projects then 128GB RAM is a good starting point, and obviously the more the better particularly if your projects are complex.

Which storage type is best for Adobe Premiere Pro?

It should go without saying, but the faster your storage the better the performance. Therefore, SSD storage is the only way to go for both your startup drive and your source files. The faster M.2 drives are preferred as they tend to offer greater read/write speeds.

It is good practice to use a second SSD for caching and once again a M.2 drive is the better choice, offering speeds up to five times faster than standard SSD drives.