Adobe Premiere Pro CC CPU & GPU Performance

Editor's Note:
Matt Bach is the head of Puget Labs and has been part of Puget Systems, a boutique builder of gaming and workstation PCs, since the early days. This article was originally published on the Puget blog.

When configuring a workstation for Premiere Pro, there is a huge variety of components that you need to choose from. Everything from what CPU and video card to the number and speed of drives you need should be taken into consideration. In this two-part article we will be tackling the question of what CPU you need by looking at six different CPU options that you might consider in a workstation. These CPUs cover the highest end model from the standard Core i7 line, three of the "High End Desktop" Intel CPUs, and a pair of dual Xeon configurations with up to 28 physical cores.

Following the CPU tests we will look at the performance of Premiere Pro 2015.3 when exporting and generating previews with the latest Pascal video cards from Nvidia. Specifically, we will be testing both single and dual GPU configurations of the GTX 1060 6GB, GTX 1070 8GB, GTX 1080 8GB, and the Titan X 12GB video cards. In addition, we will also be testing the previous generation GTX 980 Ti 6GB to see if there is any significant performance advantages to using the latest cards.

CPU Test Setup

For our CPU-centric tests wi will be using the following configurations: