Building The Best Video Editing PC Builds For All Budgets In 2024

Working in high-end video editing, visual effects and animation software required an intensive amount of processing power into one’s PC to keep running things smoothly and making the renders & encode possible. It’s important to carefully choose the best performing components for a video editing PC build.

This guide consists of all the information you’ll need for building a Custom PC build for video editing yourself that will handle most of your workloads – without spending extra on features you need like excessive amounts of RGB and sophisticated looks. Building a custom PC build although, tricky is a great choice since you get the most possible performance out of your respective budget which isn’t the case with prebuilt.

Here is a breakdown of what’s in this Custom Video Editing PC Building Guide:

Section 1: Video Editing PC Build Configurations for 4k video editing

The following 4 examples of video editing PC builds are the best for their relative prices in all budget ranges (starter, mid and high end). All the builds given here are primarily intended for video editing, visual effects and animation tasks in software like Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, Blender, Davinci resolve etc.

Budget 1080p Video Editing PC Build (₹70,000)

Best for video editing at 1080p resolutions, faster than laptops priced far beyond what this build cost. 4k editing is also possible in this video editing PC to build, but it won’t be as fast & comfortable as a PC built for 4k. If this would’ve been a gaming PC, we would’ve added an Intel Core i3 12100f since it’s faster than the Ryzen 5 3600 in single-core performance and costs less.

But this is a video editing PC build, you got to have more cores & faster multi-core performance which the Ryzen 5 3600 proves by beating the Intel i3 12th gen in multi-core performance. The build is intended primarily for video editing at 1080p resolutions. If you want more storage space in future, you can easily add a few more SSDs or HDDs to the provided MSI B550M motherboard.

Mid Range 1440p Video Editing PC Build (₹90,000)

A build for more serious video editing works up to 4k resolution. Best performance when editing at 1440p although 4k video editing is also possible at decent speeds. The CPU & GPU are a good deal faster and a larger SSD is added too. The power supply is again very great looking & high quality at a very affordable price. The case is slightly better from both cooling & visual aspects.

This machine will handle 1440p video editing like a breeze with 4k video editing possible as well. The motherboard makes this build very upgradable with a total of 4 DIMM slots that can add up to 128 GB memory, 2x PCIe X16 slots, 2x PCIe X1 slots, 6x SATA III ports & 2 M.2 Slots.

Professional 4k Video Editing PC Build (₹1,50,000)

Just the best custom pc build for 4k video editing. Editing performance at 6k will also be good and 8k may as well be doable, just not as fast. This is an extremely powerful video editing pc build. Everything is faster and nicer compared to the previous ones. The latest generation Intel Core i5 with 10 cores and 16 threads offers a huge performance boost at a very low price. There’s no AMD processor right now that offers 10-core performance at just under ₹30,000.

The rest of the components are also better in quality and performance, including a much more powerful graphics card, twice the RAM and much larger storage space. Apart from video editing, this machine will also prove to be an excellent gaming pc and will handle pretty much any type of workload.

4k video editing is what this pc is intended for in the first place but you should also be able to increase the resolutions to 6k or 8k, just not as efficiently.

High-End 6k Video Editing PC Build (₹2,00,000)

An upgrade to the previous custom video editing pc build. The processor has been changed to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950x, the ram has been doubled, addition CoolerMaster All In One closed-loop liquid CPU cooling block has been added and Graphics Card has been switched to the newest RTX 3060.

You might point out that Intel Core i9 12th generation has been proved to perform faster than the Ryzen 9 5950x, and yes we agree! but, considering the fact the Ryzen 9 5950x can be bought for a much cheaper price and is more power-efficient, it’s better to opt for the Ryzen.

The newest-generation 16-core, 32-thread AMD R9 5950X provides huge single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. A powerful cooler to keep the cpu cool and an extremely high-quality & power-efficient fully modular power supply. This PC will surely be a beast for 4k video editing – much better than the PCs we discussed earlier, but 6k & 8k video editing will also be handled seamlessly.

The Ultimate Video Editing PC Build (₹5,00,000)

An ultimate beast PC for anyone who needs the most powerful machine. Even when editing on 8k, it’s gonna just like a cool breeze of air. It’s well known that AMD’s Threadripper CPUs are the best in the world. With the power of 32 Cores & 64 Threads, the TR 3975WX combined with the burliest consumer graphics cards will single-handedly run any workload you throw at it.

You might be surprised that the best video editing software is getting better in harnessing the power of huge core counts with every update, so at any given project level, performance may increase over the lifetime of this pc build.

We’ve loaded this build with ridiculous amounts of memory, the fastest SSDs, top-tier graphics card, and a super-efficient power supply smooth liquid AIO cooling block.

Section 2: Choosing The Best Hardware For Video Editing

CPU

The most basic component of a PC Build and for a video editing one, it’s just very important. The number of cores & their speed determines how quickly your pc will be able to complete the rendering process. For any PC Build – be it gaming or workstation, we generally recommend that you get the best-suited processor first and then comes GPU, ram & all!

When working on software like Abobe Premiere, and Sony Vegas, the higher cores you have the more performance you’ll get. It’s better to have at least 6 cores for 1080p – 1440p video editing, and 10-32 cores for editing in 4k, 6k & 8k. You should also look into the speed of the cores, as it also impacts the overall performance. Simply put, the CPU is where you should be investing the most of your budget.

GPU

It’s the second important component of a pc build. You don’t need to get the best GPU when it comes to video editing and other graphics work with most of the software. It’s generally fine to go with some cheaper GPU alternative since most software mostly depends on your CPU Cores (except Davinci Resolve which primarily uses your GPU power) thus, your choice of CPU is gonna make a huge difference in the performance.

However, most modern software also uses graphics power alongside CPU through hardware acceleration so a decent GPU is still worth the pay. (Read in section 1, the best GPU options for 1080, 1440p, 4k, 6k & 8k resolution video editing.)

It should be noted that gaming however on the other side is heavily dependent on graphics card power, so keep that in mind when choosing the parts for your build.

Memory

Memory or RAM is essential for a video editing pc to build for quick & efficient editing, and also prevent the system from crashing or freezing. While 16 GB ram is enough for most of the gaming requirements, video editing software requires more (depending on the resolution you edit in). For 1080p – 1440p editing, 8 GB ram is enough but the requirement increases to at least 16 GB for 4k and 32 – 64 GB is usually enough for 6k or 8k video editing. In all these cases, more RAM is better – although should be a lower priority than getting a good CPU & GPU.

Storage (Best SSD & HDD Configuration example)

In the modern world of Custom PC building, you have two options to choose from when it comes to storage: Solid State Drives (SSD) or Hard Drive Disks (HDD). Both of them are important but SSDs should be favoured first since they are faster and more secure.

In general terms, SSDs run much faster than HDDs simply because they don’t have any physical form of disks rotating inside of them & they are the latest technology. HDDs however are also important for storage purposes since video editing can require a huge amount of space due to all those raw media, footage & finished projects and HDDs can give you more storage space at relatively cheaper prices than SSDs.

SSD also improve the overall loading/booting times, and file transfer rates and can more your video editing process a lot quicker. Here are some examples of the best SSD & HDD configurations for your video editing pc build:

• Small SSD (500 GB – 1 TB) for OS & software installations
• SSD (1 TB – 2 TB) for Project Files
• Multiple HDDs for archival storage (5-10 TB or even more)

or, for budget:

• Single SSD (240 GB – 500 GB) – For OS/Software installation and project files
• HDD (1 TB) – For archival storage

Again, SSD is not a solid requirement that you must have. If you cant afford it, it’s fine to get a decent HDD when working in 1080p – 1440p resolutions but for anyone who can afford one, it’s always better to get at least a small 240 GB SSD for installing your OS & software in. This will make a significant difference in your whole PC performance, not just video editing.

Motherboard

It’s the basic foundation of a custom pc build or generally speaking the home for your PC hardware. You want to make sure everything is compatible with the motherboard you’re choosing including the physical dimensions of the components.

Motherboards will only support processors that are compatible with the socket motherboard houses – it’s the first aspect to look for when choosing a motherboard for your CPU. The specifications of a motherboard itself don’t affect the performance of your PC but you would want to check if it has got enough DIMM slots for RAM, PCIe slots for GPU, SSDs & HDDs, the onboard sound and of course the number of USB ports available.

All motherboards don’t come with an onboard WiFi so you might want to purchase one yourself, but most modern motherboards do. One more thing you may want to purchase externally is a sound card. Even though most modern motherboards have one, they might not be as good, so for a better sound quality purchasing an external sound card would help.

Most motherboards also come with enough USB ports but you might want to make sure it has USB 3. Finally, if you’re looking into multiple hard disk drive configurations, you should also be checking the number of SATA connections it supports – Usually, it would be at least 2 of them.

Power Supply

It’s important getting a high-quality PSU. You may end up frying your components or a sudden shutdown if you got a bad PSU unit installed. You always should aim for PSUs that come with 80+ Bronze certification or more, like Gold or platinum which will ensure the most power efficiency. You should always get a PSU with output wattage slightly more than what is required by your PC.

Don’t worry! the extra power doesn’t mean it would cause an overload or fry your system. PSUs only supply the exact amount of power a component needs & the rest is vacant. You should have extra power available just so if you upgrade your PC in the future, you wouldn’t have to change the PSU too.

How much RAM is good for gaming?

For a decent gaming PC Build at least 8GB of RAM is required and 16GB of RAM is recommended to play latest games in high-res quality.

Sources

• TomsHardware – Best CPUs, Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X: Alder Lake and Ryzen 5000 Face-Off
• HardwareCanucks – 16GB vs. 32GB vs. 64GB RAM – How much do you need?