Is this PC good enough?

Question

I'm looking to pgrade from CS3 to either CS5 or possibly CS5.5 but am concerned if my computer is god enough.
These are my currect spes:
Dell Inc. Precision WorkStation 390
Processor: Intel Core (TM)2 CPU X6800 @ 2.93GHz
Memory: 8GB
Operating System System Model Windows 7 Professional (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)
2.93 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Extreme
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
4096 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded           Board: Dell Inc. 0DN075 A00
Drives           Memory Modules c,d
1000.05 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
382.25 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
Can anybody advise?
Brian

Answer 1

Brian,
Regrettably, I will have to agree with Harm in this case. Your system barely meets Adobe's stated minimum requirements for CS5.x for the CPU and RAM (well, 8GB is more than Adobe's stated minimum requirement) to begin with. And forget about using Premiere Pro on that system, especially since you have only a single hard drive. Premiere Pro requires a minimum of two separate hard drives in order to work properly (plus, the rest of the PC's specs are significantly below the "practical" minimum requirements to run Premiere Pro CS5.x). Using just one hard drive for absolutely everything (OS, media, output, previews, programs, cache and projects) will make even an extremely fast system relatively sluggish - not to mention that since your system's hard drive is more than half full, your system will likely perform hundreds if not thousands of times slower than a properly tuned fast system. Also, you did not state which graphics card you have on that system, especially since a not-well-supported card will slow down CS5.x MPE performance even more.
In other words, just because a system just meets Adobe's stated minimum requirements does not mean that it will run that program well at all.