New Machine purchase advice to run Premiere Pro & After Effect 5.5

Question

I am about to purchase a new pc with the following specs: Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit), Intel® Core™i7-930 processor(8MB L2 Cache, 2.80GHz), 12GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz - 6 DIMMs, ATI Radeon HD5970 2GB GDDR5 video card. Are these good features? I cannot find any compatability or certification for any ATI video cards on the Adobe site. Is the video card, ram and cpu good to get the acceleration featured of CS5.5 (specifically Premiere Pro & After Effect)?

Answer 1

To answer your question:
That build could be better equipped.
First off, Windows 7 Home Premium maxes out at 16GB of RAM. This means that if you want to put in 24GB total anytime in the near future, Windows 7 Home Premium will make only the first 16GB available for programs. You will need Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate in order to use more than 16GB of RAM.
Second, Premiere Pro CS5.5 needs more than 12GB to run at its best. However, since that build fills up all six DIMM slots to attain 12GB, you would have to discard some of the DIMMs in order to add more RAM at all. As a result, if you must have only 12GB, I'd recommend three 4GB DIMMs instead of six 2GB DIMMs. These days, 4GB DIMMs sell for about $40 to $50 USD each ($120 to $150 for 12GB, or $240 to $300 for 24GB) whereas a year ago they sold for $200 to $300 USD apiece ($600 to $900 for 12GB; or well over $1,000 for 24GB).
Third, Adobe does not currently support the use of any ATi or AMD GPU in its MPE GPU acceleration feature. This means that any ATi or AMD GPU, including the top-of-the-line models, will force MPE to run in software-only mode. And software-only mode is often 10 times or more slower than MPE GPU mode. At present the MPE GPU mode supports only Nvidia GPU-equipped cards with 896MB or more RAM and CUDA support.
Fourth, that HD 5970 is a dual-GPU card. Unfortunately, Adobe does not support the use of more than one GPU at all, which means that the HD 5970 goes half-unused in any flavor of CS5.x - and then, it goes to software-only mode, to boot since it's not an Nvidia GPU. As a result, the HD 5970 performs no better than an HD 5850 in CS5.x, especially since the HD 5970 actually consists of two HD 5850's on a single card. In other words, dual-GPU cards are a total waste of money, as far as Premiere Pro and After Effects are concerned.
Finally, if that system has only one hard drive, I'd strongly recommend adding two or more additional hard drives. This is because Adobe requires a minimum of two hard drives (one for the OS and programs, the second for everything else) just to run without severe slowdowns in performance. The more (hard drives), the better.