I agree with OldSmoke on his suggestions. Though, doubt the processor is the problem, since I have the Haswell-E version of yours, the 5820K, and it runs great. Especially if using 1920x1080 footage (24, 30 & 60 fps in my case). And this is with running Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit and Magix Movie Studio Platinum 14 Suite (on this machine), while driving a Samsung 28 inch 4k display.

If you are using 4K footage and/or from a GoPro or other type of "action" or "drone" camera, and even like ShadowPlay from nVidia capture, AMD Re-Live, X-Split or OBS...recommend transcoding that footage first. Even with the 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 2666 MHz, and a GTX 1080 on an MSI X99A Gaming 7 board in my system, with OS on a PCIE NVME drive, it gets "bogged down". That is even after making sure the footage is on a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB drive!

OldSmoke's recommendation for the video card is sound as well, though if budget is tight, you could use a GTX 1060 6GB or a GTX 1070 card. No sense in recommending a Polaris AMD RX 470/480/570/580 or either of the Vega 56/64 cards, until Magix has done its "magic" (pun intended! 😉) with an update to that card architecture. And if you're really bogged for cash, the GTX 1050Ti.

Of course, as OldSmoke said, knowing what type of footage you typically put on the timeline, and what you do with that footage (export to MP4, disc, Youtube/Vimeo, etc.), makes it a bit difficult to really give much more advice.

Hope this helps some.

Mike "The Chief" O'Sullivan

Below I will share my PC specs, goals, and so on. I would appreciate advice for what things I can do to my PC internals to improve video editing. All of the details are below to clarify. Thank you

given my computer system’s specs:

• Platform: Windows 7 (64-bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i7-6800K CPU @ 3.40GHz (12 processors)
• Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H55
• MOBO: Asus X99-E
• Physical memory: 8 GB [4 GB x 2] DDR4-2800 ADATA XPG Z1
• Paging memory available: 16 GB
• Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 2GB SC GAMING 02G-P4-1958-KR
• (let me know if you need other specs)

and given that *the processor and MOBO are going to stay the same*

and given the following internal drive setup

• C: (Operating System) = Samsung SSD 850 EVO 256GB ATA Device
• H: (All docs, photos, videos, etc) = Toshiba HD 4TB MD04ACA400 SATA 6.0Gb/s 7200rpm
• Probably irrelevant to video editing since it’s totally unrelated:
• L: (Lightroom Catalog and Previews) = Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB ATA Device

and given the editing software is Vegas Pro 15

What are the top recommended things (hardware upgrades, settings, etc) that I can do to improve video editing performance in terms of:

• ability to edit clips, add lots of tracks, images, etc without software crashing or slowing down alot
• performance of scrubbing and generally previewing projects with the aforementioned qualities
• (I’m less concerned with the rendering speed of the final production output, if it’s separate from the things above. But if it is the same as the preview and scrubbing performance, then it matters as well)

Possible things i’m thinking of (keeping in mind I am not knowledgeable about these things)

• Increasing internal RAM
• Adding an SSD scratch disk
• Installing another SSD and moving raw video files, images, etc, to it for the project editing phase

Open to other ideas, advice, etc.

Thank you very much for your assistance

You have listed a lot of valuable information but left out the most important; what kind of source footage you are working with.

Nevertheless, your system is a good system and I wonder what problems you are currently facing.

However, if you would like to improve your system without changing the major components, I suggest to get a better water cooler, a H100 as a minimum or better a custom loop to help with overclocking the CPU. Vegas improves more with higher clock speeds then core counts. By the way, your processor is a 6-core, 12-thread CPU, not a 12 processor CPU. The -7-6800K is not a preferred CPU by overclockers as it hits the ceiling quite fast but you should get a stable 4.2-4.4GHz with a custom loop. That will get and additional 10-15% performance gain.

8GB RAM is bit low and I would go with 32GB, 4x8GB modules of DDR4-2400, the highest speed the CPU can handle. My daily editing is done on SSDs rather than mechanical drives, I have those for storage. I big difference made a PCIe based SSD, it is faster than my RAID0 SSD I had before, a noticeable improvement editing 4K footage in a multicam project.

The GTX920 with 2GB is also on the low side and if you consider changing it then your decision is based on the version of Vegas Pro you are editing with, VP15 in your case, which works better with NVIDIA cards, a GTX1080 Ti would be a good choice.

Thank you so much for your help. I’m new to all of this so I didn’t think about the footage. It’s 1920 x 1080 @ 29.97 FPS or sometimes 59.94 FPS. Nothing crazy like 4K

Do you think I could use the cooler I have if I keep the overclock to about 4 GHz ? (BTW I know zilch about overclocking, how to do it, what not to do, etc)

My current RAM is DDR4-2800, but you suggest DDR4-2400. Is the lower number actually faster? Or is there something else I don’t know about increasing the RAM per chip or the total RAM, that requires a lower number?

Are you suggesting an M.2 SSD? And is that to replace my current OS drive, or is that just for holding the project files and raw media?

Thanks again!