Upgrade for editing

Now that I'm editing 4K clips, my PC is not adequate anymore. It's a few years old, but a complete new build is not in my budget now. Which component makes the biggest difference for editing; RAM, GPU, or CPU? Right now, it seems to be chugging along OK until I get to grading in Premiere with an effect or two on tracks. Then it just hangs or can't play back smoothly.

I've searched for info on the Net, but most discussions I see about video editing are best upgrades for rendering. Since stock is not time critical I don't care about rendering speeds right now.

My system is:
AMD FX-4100 Quad-Core Processor
16Gb DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT

You may not get a smooth play in Premiere Pro. Set the pre-view to 50% quality on render playback. That will smooth what you see. The render processing should work fine even though it looks not smooth.

Thanks. I'll try that.

You will definitely need a better GPU. Most applications use hardware acceleration through CUDA. A friend of mine used to do real time editing in Premiere with 5K RED footage with a GTX 580. Of course only editing no effects applied.

Yea, the 9400 is slow and only has 16 Cuda cores. I imagine the 580 would be much better.

I just upgraded my GTX 680 for a GTX 980 Ti
Editing and rendering is much quicker.

I think the 3 things you need to get editing faster.
Ram (as much as you can)
Video card (fastest you can afford)

SSD drive for the OS and a separate SSD for rendering/cache files (I believe this is the one thing that makes any pc faster)

I timed using an SSD versus a fast hard drive on rendering and saving some 4K clips. The difference in speed for me was within a couple seconds. If using a slower external hard drive it failed to finish rendering many times. Premiere Pro CC was faster than the external hard drive could take.

What about the 'real time' editing in premiere on SSD vs HDD? I don't think the HDD drive slows the render because it's only writing 30mb or so per second because the render itself takes longer to go through the process. But on a timeline playing back the footage real time it has to push that data through the processor to display it, which at 1.5gb for 10 secs is really taxing a 7200rpm drive.

I saw really no difference on my computer between SSD and HD. A 4K clip renders and saves pretty quick. Maybe a much faster GPU would result in a bigger difference.

Thanks. That's helpful to know. I won't worry about an SSD for now then. I might get a GTX660 for a decent price. Not current but still appears to be far better than my current GPU.