Premiere Pro is lagging on my brand new computer.

Question

My Stats are
Intel Core i7 (4th Gen) 4720HQ / 2.6 GHz
16 gig ram DDR3L SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M - 4 GB GDDR5 SDRAM
Cache L3 6MB
2TB internal HDD
Editing 4k 29 fps mp4 running at 60,000 kbps
I just bought a brand new laptop that was supposedly able to edit 4K video with Premiere Pro CS6. It is an Acer Aspire V15 Nitro Black Edition with the above stated stats.
I bought a laptop because I need to do editing in more than one location and was told that I was going to be able to get away without having a desktop by using this computer, yet the program continues to lag significantly.
Any suggestions???

Answer 1

...I agree with Bill....I have the same laptop as him and upgraded the memory and drives like he did to achieve good performance. You machine has a better CPU and GPU than ours. As I have seen my laptop go over 20 GB of system memory use on certain complex timelines, I would suggest adding more memory...16GB these days is a little marginal...Bill and I have 24GB and if you can max it out at 32GB, that would be the best. Whoops....just saw your specs and it says maximum memory is 16GB in two slots only.....I'm not sure if only 16GB will hamper 4K editing or not...you can monitor memory use with "task manager" to see if it maxes out, ( make sure your memory settings are correct in PPro "preferences" ).
If you have the M.2 slot , using  the XP941 would be a HUGE speed improvement. PPro needs two separate drives ,( unless using the XP941 ), to work properly in most cases. Using Crucial M550 SSDs are a good choice...they offer similar performance to the Samsung 850 Pro series at a lower price. Any single spinning hard drive will be a bottleneck with 4K...and most other footage. A 5400rpm drive makes a good paperweight, or, missile to be hurled at your TV screen !! Some newer laptops offer various storage configurations....check and see what yours are. Again, just saw someone from Acer telling a customer that your M.2 slot is limited to SATA III speed and is NOT PCI. In that case, the high speed XP 941 would be out, and you would have to use an M.2 SATA III SSD in that slot AND a second SATA III SSD, ( 2.5 inch ) in the other slot. One to be a boot drive with Windows OS and pagefile and programs....the other with all media, project files, cache files, previews,etc. You can experiment putting cache files on boot drive,or, previews, too, because of the high transfer speed of the SATA III SSDs.
Check out B&H or New Egg for deals on those SSDs, being careful to get the EXACT correct size M.2 SATA SSD for your particular slot. Your performance should increase greatly.....the single spinning slow HDD is the root of all evil !!...banish it !!
Bill is also correct about safely overclocking the GPU to achieve better performance. I use the free "MSI Afterburner" utility to overclock the memory clock to 903MHz over the native frequency, bringing the total to 2907 MHz and I tweak the core clock just a little, up 30 MHz. When exporting a complex timeline with many CUDA accelerated effects, this overclock has reduced my exporting time as much as 25%. There is NO overheating....with a different program I could probably increase the memory clock even more,but, this is good enough.
One thing to note...Eric Bowen here on the forum has shown in his testing that the newer Creative Cloud versions of PPro are much better at handling 4K than CS6, or, other previous versions. I know I experienced a noticeable improvement with the newer version on other codecs as well.
Good Luck !