I would update the Intel Core i7 980 from 2011 if you could but that would probably also be a motherboard change and a RAM change. The newer Intel Core processors have steadily gotten better and better at the same clock speed and Vegas Pro thrives on CPU processing.

~jr

I assume from your specs that Vegas alone with footage like AVCHD up 30fps or HDV is working well, just Sony FXs? BCC8 and NBTP are sure not smooth on your system and to get there will take a lot more then a simple upgrade.

You can see my system spec and BCC9 just does ok with 1080 30p at Best/Full and also depending on the FX applied. Light Rays for example are compute intensive. These 3rd party plug-ins utilize OpenCL and benefit greatly from an AMD card like a R9 290 or higher. OpenCL is better implemented on AMD/ATI versus NVIDIA.

It really depends on what you are expecting from your upgrade. What type of projects you work on and your source footage.

With that configuration i'd be much more concerned about what else you have running rather than the hardware. Do a Ctrl-Alt-Delete, bring up task manager, and switch to the Processes tab. A good clean Win7 install should have maybe 20 or less processes in an idle state. If you have substantially more than that then you probably have unnecessary CPU hoggish programs running that you don't need.

While you're there, you could try setting Vegas' priority to Above Normal and see how much that helps. If it does, then you definitely have things running that you don't want.

In msconfig under Startup you can most likely turn off everything. Under Services hide all Microsoft services, and what's left you can probably turn off everything except your antivirus. With a lot of the older computers here at school i've done this simple step and suddenly 6 year old PCs are running faster than brand new ones right out of the box that have all the manufacturer's crud still installed.

If disabling startup stuff still doesn't help a lot then you should start scanning for viruses and trojans.

Ushere: Format is usually mp4 1080 from DSLRs, Gopros, XA245s and such. I am considering however to buy a Canon c100 MkII using AVCHD but I don't know if Vegas swallows AVCHD.
Usually no 4K.
I has been working pretty well earlier and still it does while editing in 8 bit mode but as soon as I turn on 32-bit floating point and start rendering Vegas usually crashes. The 32 bit FP steps up the color rendering quite a bit I think and I would like to use it more. Playing back from timeline with 32bit FP is a complete stutter...
I wouldn't like to spend an awfull lot of money at this time. I think in a year or two I might get a brand new workstation altogether. So it is just to keep me going for anothe while.

Do you mean Windows 10? Ah, that sound daunting! Wouldn't that crash Everything?

JohnnyRoy: Interesting...

OldSmoke: Exactly that way! So it seems natural that my system stutters with those specs? My projects are quite small nowadays. Mainly 8-10 tracks, 5-10 minute videos, and a couple of titles, some effects, color correction and such but nothing out of the ordinary.

Chienworks: I just checked that and got 108 processes running.... :) and I put Vegas in higher than normal priority. Let's see if it helps. I'll try that msconfig tick as well.

Except for this, would changing Graphics card to an AMD R9 or something make a big difference on editing, playback and rendering flow? Or is it better to wait and get a new machine in a year or two?

the R9 would make a difference but not big enough. 32bit projects are extremely compute extensive and you will need a top notch machine to get Best/Full preview, fastest dual xeon cpu setup with a FirePro card may do it but you are looking at a 10K upgrade!

Reply by: Martin L
I turn on 32-bit floating point and start rendering Vegas usually crashes.

Does it seem to crash at the same point in the rendering process? To help troubleshoot try launching Task Manager ( Ctrl + Shift + Esc), render a project that crashes and watch your memory usage.

You may want to reseat the memory sticks and video card to verify contact connections are good.

If you're rendering w/ GPU on try turning that off if you haven't already.

Thanks. Well 10K, if that is US$ you mean, is about 10x my upgrade budget.....
I guess I wait with that.
On the other hand, I don't expect Vegas timeline to play smoothly with 32bit FP turned on. I Always edit with ordinary 8-bit. But when rendering I think it makes a noticeble difference to the better with 32-bit FP. But that seems to be to much for my old machine. I know Vegas can handle it but the PC seems somewhat tired.

Byron K: I will take my PC to the IT workshop soon and ask them to check up all Contact pins and probably install a SSD as a boot disk.

Posting some systems details from something like a Speccy snapshot would help.

Off the top of my head, I would look at the following for on the cheap things to consider;

24GB of RAM - have your IT shop look at if this memory config is the max speed profile for the motherboard, and that the correct channels are populated. X58 chipset has triple channel memory configuration.

Pull the NV570 and ebay an AMD 7970-ghz, or replace with a 290X/390x. This card can be moved later to a newer system. Power supply requirements need to be considered when doing this. The 7970 would be about max for that vintage of hardware. Beyond that you would need a whole new CPU, memory, motherboard.

upgrade to SSD for C:/boot drive, and possibly 1TB SSD for media drives. Use Spinning for project archiving.


Beyond these upgrades, you would be best looking into an x99 or skylake system due to the significant architecture upgrades like PCIe3.0, PCIe lane capacity, DMI3.0, and DDR4. PCIe3.0 is not only faster, but offers lower latency and overhead.

32-bit Floating Point color mode means you need to optimize your system for floating point performance. This means looking at your MFLOP performance on your CPU combined with the GFLOP performance of your GPU.