The Best Workstation for
Adobe After Effects

Adobe's After Effects allows you to create eye-catching motion graphics and visual effects for social posts and videos that won’t be ignored. It is widely used in the post-production process of filmmaking, video editing, and television production with a variety of tools and techniques ready to be mastered. 

Recommended Hardware for Adobe After Effects

Processor (CPU)

Adobe After Effects loves fast CPUS and is arguablly the most important component in any AE workstation. In our testing the Intel Core i7 14700K and 14900K top the charts, outperforming their AMD counterparts by a resonable margin. When utilizing AE’s new Multi-Frame Rendering mode we found AMDs Threadripper 7000 series CPUs to take fully advantage of this feature due to their higher core count. Additionally the Threadripper CPUs support more than double the RAM capacity (256GB on TRX50 - 1TB on WRX90 chipset), another key component when building an After Effects workstation.

Memory (RAM)

If your projects in After Effects are big, have high resolution, or are complicated, having a lot of RAM can be really helpful. More RAM lets After Effects keep more previews in its memory instead of on a storage disk, making the playback smoother. Even though using a fast SSD for storage can help a bit, RAM is still way faster than any hard drive or SSD. Generally for most users we recommened 64GB of RAM, 128GB for projects at 4K or above and 256GB for the best possible experience. 

Graphics Card (GPU)

In After Effects, having a supported GPU is crucial, but the impact of a more powerful GPU depends on how many GPU-accelerated effects you use. We recommened the latest NVIDIA 40 Series GPUs however, the scalling performance to the higher-end cards is very small and is something to think of when budgeting other components like your CPU or RAM. VRAM on the GPU plays an important part of the overall performance and is why the 12GB RTX 4070 is a great starting point with the 16GB RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 SUPER offering the best bang for your buck. The chart topping 24GB RTX 4090 can be benifital to high profile users who want the best perfomance, especially when using multi-frame rendering.

Storage (SSD / HDD / NVMe SSD)

We recommened having 3 or 4 drives in your After Effects workstation. OS Drive, Project Drive, Cache Drive and finally Storage Drive. 

For your OS drive (C:drive) we suggest a NVMe SSD as it greatly improved the overall experience of Windwos, loading into programs, boot times and searching for files. 

Your Project Drive will be your main AE drive, where all your assests, project files and installation of AE would be installed. For this a NVMe SSD is our go to as the cost of these have significantly come down over the years almost matching the much slower SATA SSDs. 

The Media Cache or Scratch Drive is used for temporary storage for assests/ files that don’t fit in the memory. Due to the high performance requirments we would again suggest an NVMe SSD to allow the best performance possible.

Lastly you will want a Storage Drive in order to keep the finished projects in a safe place. High capacity SSDs and Hard Drives are great to locally store the files inside your PC. We recommned having an external back-up beit via a NAS or USB Hard Drive, just incase.    

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