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Building your own editing PC – Updated 2026 guide

Nick Lear
Building your own editing PC – Updated 2026 guide 11

Back in 2021 I wrote a comprehensive guide to building your own editing PC that I’m still fairly proud of. It’s had a lot of readers over the years and is still a good reference for the basics. Here I will assume you know those things (or go back and read them) and update you on the latest news.

The headline being that whilst back then we had the GPU crisis, we now have the so-called RAMpocalyspe, where RAM prices have literally quadrupled in about 4 months. This leaves us with a big question – are these price hikes a passing thing or are they here to stay?

The DRAM shortage

So the biggest issue at present – the massive price rise in consumer DRAM prices, which is also having a knock on effect on other component prices.

The long and the short of it is that the big AI players are using their massive resources to buy up the capacity of the big 3 manufacturers (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) as the AI arms race continues to devour compute at any cost – more GPUs = bigger training runs = more capable AI, at least that’s the easiest, if not the cheapest, way to achieve that. This means those companies can make more money using their fabs to produce the HBM memory for the likes of Open AI instead of selling DRAM to us. And whilst there isn’t a complete consensus, it appears that most commenters think this is going to last a good few years and get worse before it gets better. Here are a few key points:

The crucial.com website tells a sad tale
PC Part Picker’s price tracker for DDR5 RAM, also not a happy tale

So what are our choices?

When prices shoot up, it may seem obvious that you just need to wait it out. But in this case, some are saying prices might not come down til 2030 and could keep going up in the meantime. Having read a lot on the subject, I am on the pessimistic side – I think things will get worse for the foreseeable future, though maybe not quite as long as that. The AI arms race seems to ramp up each week at the moment. And they have the money – at least until a possible crash, but that’s hard to predict when or if that might happen.

So what to do:

A review of hardware changes in the last five years

Here’s a quick reminder of what’s changed in the last few years & what hasn’t.

What’s changed:

What hasn’t changed:

With that in mind, I’ll go through the main hardware considerations

The CPU

In the original article I wrote, AMD had a pretty meaningful lead over Intel in performance per dollar. Not that long after that, things changed – and the key was Intel’s QuickSync technology built into their chips. For the Adobe Premiere Pro editor specifically, having an Intel chip became a major advantage because it could essentially team up with the GPU on the tricky task of dealing with those compressed (and hard to play back) codecs H.264 and H.265 (HEVC). For example, you are exporting a timeline and QuickSync decodes the H.264 while your Nvidia GPU handles the encoding. I have an Intel chip in my (beefy) laptop and it does export quicker than my AMD PC.

Minutes matter when you’re exporting & it’s not just export, it’s snappy timeline responsiveness and lower energy use. It also frees up your GPU for GPU-accelerated effects, debayering R3D footage and so on. AMD does have its own hardware video engine (Video Core Next), but it has always lagged behind QuickSync in NLE implementation.

Worth noting – at one point Adobe changed the H.264 decoding priority so that Nvidia sometimes takes precedence over Intel’s QuickSync, so you may want to double check that depending on your setup and version in Preferences > Media – and ideally test your options for H.264 workflows.

But what about all the other times when you’re not decoding H.264/H.265? Well, then the trusty AMD Threadripper is still awesome, using its brute force power to get you where you need to go. (And I will say from experience having one, using the computer generally and multitasking just feels very snappy).

So what does all this mean for the CPU decision? Based on Puget’s current recommendation page for Premiere and Davinci Resolve (but check those pages to keep up to date):

If you’re using DaVinci Resolve rather than (or as well as) Premiere, the GPU becomes even more important than the CPU – and some of these trade-offs shift accordingly.

I always like to compare price against performance and here is a chart of PugetBench points per $ that shows that as you pay more for your CPU, you get less bang per buck – in a remarkably linear way (spot the odd one out). Though you may be willing to pay for that increase in cores that could come in useful in other software or multitasking in general, so you need to look at all use cases. I mean I looked at all this last time and still bought a Threadripper!

Price goes up, performance per $ goes down!

The GPU – Nvidia retains the lead

This is where the most has changed since 2021 – both in terms of the market and the specific recommendations.

First: the GPU shortage that dominated the original article is over, but prices have been affected by RAM demand (see the Tom’s Hardware tracker). Notably the 5090 is going for about double what it should at the moment. The rest are at roughly 20-30% over MSRP. A scatter graph shows the same story as CPUs – the performance per dollar goes down as you pay more. For simple 1080p with proxies in Premiere for example, it is a waste to go much above a 5060. But then remember the VRAM rule of thumb – “double the res” (4K timeline = 8GB VRAM etc). And then will you be doing any VRAM hungry things, like:

If that is you, the big question currently is whether you want to pay $2500 extra for a 5090 over a 5080.

Same story as CPUs
Tom’s Hardware daily tracker as of Mar 25th – click the link above for the latest

Nvidia remains the clear choice. Puget’s research consistently shows higher performance with Nvidia GeForce cards than comparably priced AMD Radeon cards – a combination of superior CUDA performance, better GPU-accelerated effects support and Nvidia’s hardware media engine. There is probably some Chicken & Egg going on here with Adobe and Intel/Nvidia – it’s more worth their while to support the hardware that most people have and then that hardware gets even better performance with the better software integration and then more people buy it. So I do feel a bit for AMD and hope that they can catch up as competition is always good.

The RTX 5000 series (Blackwell) is the current gen Nvidia card, released early 2025 and it’s worth a quick update on what’s changed – particularly for editors. I have reviewed Nvidia cards before and one thing that is clear is that for basic work, you don’t need one of the higher models. They are way more powerful than most editing needs.

Puget testing shows a slight improvement of the 50-series over the 40-series, but a really decent one over the 30-series

The 5000 series did bring additional native hardware support for 10 bit 4:2:2 chroma subsampling in H.264 and H.265 – something the 3080 and 4080 couldn’t do. But based on Puget’s current testing, the gap over the 4000 series in Premiere is still modest in overall score, with the bigger gains showing in LongGOP-specific tests.

The 5080 also launched at $999 – $200 less than the 4080 launched at, which is a welcome change of direction after the pricing controversy I covered at the time. For editors sitting on a 4080, the upgrade case isn’t that compelling yet. For anyone building a new machine from scratch, the 5000 series is the obvious current-generation choice at that price point.

Added hardware support in the 50-series

From Puget’s current testing:

Nvidia’s lead in Davinci Resolve which is matched in Premiere Pro

The rest (Motherboards, SSDs, RAM, cases etc)

Things get a little simpler here, partly as your choices narrow once you’ve decided on your CPU.

SSDs have had a price jump too

Jumping in the deep end

So assuming you have done your research and decided to build, here’s where to start.

Go to PCPartPicker.com & check your country is correct. Register a free account, go to System Builder and start logging your planned components.

It walks you through all the key components:

But the real value is in its compatibility checker, which cuts out the vast majority of your potential mistakes before you spend a penny. Does your power supply have enough wattage? Do you have the right chipset and socket for your CPU? Will the cooler physically fit in the case? It has a massive database under the hood that catches all of this automatically. It also shops around for the best price across around 40 countries – and if yours isn’t listed, you can add prices manually.

As I said, it doesn’t seem to have the latest Threadrippers, which is a pity. If you go for one, you’ll need a motherboard with a TRX50 chipset and sTR5 socket like the ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WiFi.

Motherboard & Cooler

Once you’ve settled on a CPU, the motherboard decision gets much easier. The socket and chipset have to match, and the consensus from reviewers narrows the field quickly. Gamers Nexus remains my main reference here. Work out how many USB ports, ethernet ports and M.2 slots you need, whether you want built-in WiFi, and go from there.

For the cooler, the Noctua range is still the go-to recommendation – find the model that fits your socket and you won’t go wrong. Near silent at idle, which is exactly what you want. But there are cheaper options out there.

Memory

The system requirements for Premiere recommend 32GB, but as I said in the original article, I’d seen 32GB max out regularly enough – especially with a big Production – that I went with 128GB. My advice now would be 64GB as a sensible minimum for serious professional use, with 128GB if you’re regularly working in 6K or 8K or big projects and Productions. But with prices as they are, you may have to compromise somewhat.

Storage

The advice here is largely the same as before: one drive for Windows and programs, a second dedicated to cache. After that you can fill your remaining M.2 slots with NVMe SSDs for proxies and perhaps use a RAID for main media OCFs. NVMe is fully mainstream now – Gen 4 is the current sweet spot, prices have come down considerably and there’s no good reason to be buying SATA SSDs for primary storage on a new build. Gen 5 exists but the real-world benefit for editing workloads over Gen 4 is marginal for the price premium.

Opening and working with larger Premiere projects on NVMe rather than spinning disk or even SATA SSD is a genuine quality-of-life improvement – I noticed it immediately on my own machine.

AI-accelerated workflows – what you actually need to know

Basically mostly you can ignore the marketing. So having an “AI” CPU is not that big a deal, with a fancy NPU (Neural Processing Unit). But you’ll probably get one anyway on a new CPU.

The AI features that are genuinely already useful in a Premiere workflow – Enhance Speech, auto-captioning, scene editing detection, text-based editing, and the various generative AI tools Adobe are folding into the suite – are largely running either in the cloud or on the GPU. For any GPU-based AI, a good Nvidia card is your best investment and you’ll have that covered already.

What about ARM / Snapdragon X?

Apple Silicon’s success made it inevitable that someone would make a serious attempt at bringing ARM architecture to Windows. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is the most credible contender – the battery life and efficiency figures are genuinely impressive, and the CPU performance benchmarks are respectable. This is probably a question more for your next laptop, but I’ll cover it briefly.

With NLEs specifically, there is support, but this is still a work in progress. Premiere & Resolve both support ARM natively, but there are still features awaiting full support like ProRes RAW or plug-ins. I don’t know that many editors brave enough to try this, but if you have, let us know in the comments.

Budget vs Performance

As I mentioned above, the more you spend, the worse your performance for the price. But there are many compelling reasons to spend more if you value the performance of a better machine. I certainly have never regretted what I spent on mine. A machine you use all day, five days a week, for 4-8 years is being used for around 1,000-2000 working days. Spreading the cost out like that makes it a lot easier to justify spending a bit more to get something genuinely capable.

A useful check once you have a parts list together: run PugetBench on your current machine, then look at Puget’s results database to see what score you’d expect from what you’re planning to build.

Setting it up

There are plenty of set up guides for you to follow, which I definitely suggest you do. Some points are:

Conclusion

When I built my machine back in 2021, my day to day editing completely changed. It made such a big difference and I absolutely loved researching and building it. That machine is still running incredibly well today, which says something.

There are still risks. If you’re on mission-critical work with no tolerance for downtime, perhaps better to go with a specialist like Puget or Scan. But if you have the time and the inclination to put in the research, I’d recommend it.

And do I need to mention that the price increases have tipped the balance just that little bit more in the Apple direction – oh, I suppose I must. Though even Apple haven’t been immune to putting their RAM upgrade prices up.

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Additional links

Beginner channels

Regular updates channels

Hardware review channels

Hardware review sites

Forums

Alternative parts lists

Puget Systems resources

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