Look at @BruceUSA system! That is what I would target for.

Looks sturdy, thanks !

I'm starting to get so annoyed by it that I'm willing to spend what it takes to upgrade my preview to acceptable, smooth and trouble free speed and functionality.

The people who have the kind of successful outcome you seek, have done so not by throwing money at it, which can be a crapshoot, but by diligent investigation and technique to rule out any of hundreds of possible bottlenecks, on an adequate system.

Here is a parallel anecdote about greatly improving render speeds through diligent application of investigational strategies, which many of us promptly forgot upon completion of our first school geometry class.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/fast-vp15-rendering-at-last--114965/

Maybe the OP can tell us what his current system consists off?

my specs:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core

32Bg RAM

Radeon R290 latest driver

@musicvid: render speed is not my concern at all. I just need a fluid timeline preview that won't start and not framedropping and stuttering at the slightest Fx usage. And yes, I went through the tweaks and tips and FAQs put together on this board.

my specs:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core

32Bg RAM

Radeon R290 latest driver

@musicvid: render speed is not my concern at all. I just need a fluid timeline preview that won't start and not framedropping and stuttering at the slightest Fx usage. And yes, I went through the tweaks and tips and FAQs put together on this board.

And what kind of source files are you working with? My 3930K handles 4K XAVC-I nicely in 8bit at Best/Full.

last project was all XAVC-S which I converted to XAVC-I for better timeline performance. Vegas was still struggling when it came to FX. This time it's all XAVC-I from an FS7, and again, FX throw it out of balance pretty quickly.

I stay in 8 bit with the 10 bit files, and as soon as it comes to compositing and multi layered tracks, it's impossible to view fluently. I then mainly work in preview/full or sometimes even draft to get an idea of what works and what's going on at all..

my next upgrade is going to be another Dollar drop for VP17 hoping for a meaninful upgrade of the core programming to support current hardware. There is no need anymore to be backwards compatible with a 486 running DOS. My hardware is fast enough and yet I have the same issues @Mindmatter not that this helps

last project was all XAVC-S which I converted to XAVC-I for better timeline performance. Vegas was still struggling when it came to FX. This time it's all XAVC-I from an FS7, and again, FX throw it out of balance pretty quickly.

I stay in 8 bit with the 10 bit files, and as soon as it comes to compositing and multi layered tracks, it's impossible to view fluently. I then mainly work in preview/full or sometimes even draft to get an idea of what works and what's going on at all..

If I compare your system to mine, the R290 is the only thing I would upgrade to a Vega Frontier Edition. The 5820k should be water-cooled and running @4.5GHz, that will give you some good boost. A 8-core is certainly better for multi layered compositing and eventually you will have to work with proxies. I am always careful when users say "FXs" are the issues, Vegas native FXs are almost all GPU accelerated and do run well even on my lower end system. SSDs are a must or better NVMe drives. Also important is your RAM which should be running at the speed the memory controller is designed for; higher spec RAM running at lower speed but also faster latency is always better then overclocked RAM.

If money is no issue... Lots of bandwidth. Fastest hard drives you can get (Raid 10 NVME if you want to get ridiculously fast and stable with it, then a mechanical drive to use for storage. Copy files you are currently editing onto the Raid drive for best performance, save the results to the mechanical drive), Pair that with a Intel Core i9-9900K (or Intel Xeon W-3175X... you said money wasn't an issue...) and a top of the line radeon pro card with 16GB VRAM and 12teraflops of horsepower under the hood... Radeons from what I gather tend to work better with timeline acceleration, but it is worth looking into the newer RTX Nvidia cards as well, as they are supposed to have improved openCL performance. Has anyone benchmarked those vs. the latest radeons in Vegas? From there, I'd toss in 64-128GB of some blazing fast DDR4-4000 RAM, and call it a day (the more the better, especially if you plan on using After Effects or any other similar memory hungry app alongside Vegas).

That is a system I'd build to be able to handle my general purpose loads with Cinema 4D, After Effects, Lightroom, etc... keeping the highest amount of bandwidth possible from point A to B is key to removing any slowdown that might pop up... and this approach leaves LOTS of headroom for higher quality/bitrate formats down the road,

Mindmatter, I was trying to give an example of a user spending time rather than money to solve an issue. I have no concern with your render times.

Thanks all, that'll get me shopping sooner or later. Sooner, rather, I guess.

OldSmoke, I have no clue about overclocking...guess I'll have to read my way in to it ( presuming that's what you meant with the 4,5 ghz ).

Also, i've looked at the Vega Frontier edition, strangely the prices vary somewhere between 580 and 1500 €...I can't seem to understand the differences.

I tried upgrading from GTX 970 to RX580 and speed editing was just as bad with 4k and Full HD reverse sample video. I have Intel Xeon E3-1231 3.3Ghz. Two of my friends have an AMD processor. One AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and a second friend of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X. They have no problem with the editing speeds. The power of Vegas is in the number of cores. The more, the faster it is to edit. For rendering, it's a better GPU.

Sorry my english :-)

The power of Vegas is in the number of cores. The more, the faster it is to edit.

Not quite true. Anything beyond 8 or 10 cores yields very little performance gain. Fast CPU clock and single core performance are key for Vegas. Xeon's are hard to overclock and usually cant run full speed on all cores.