adobe workstations

Photoshop & Lightroom

If you rely on these popular photo-editing packages, you want to make sure that whatever Adobe workstations you purchase, you include an SSD and (for your budget) maximize the amount of RAM. RAW files create a large RAM footprint and opening and saving projects will be accelerated by the speed delivered with an SSD. Any professional GPU from NVIDIA or AMD will provide the OpenCL accelerating used in various filters. Spending more on a GPU delivers diminishing returns, so even a basic GPU will suit your needs, unless you need exotic display support for higher resolutions or maximum display arrays.

Premiere Pro & After Effects

While these two applications often go hand in hand, Premiere Pro and After Effects utilize your system in slightly different ways. CPUs: Encoding and rendering previews are a CPU-intensive process, so the main control you have over export times is to have the fastest CPU possible. Both Premiere Pro and After Effects are lightly threaded during the encoding process. This means that, depending on the project, encoding can make use of four to eight CPU cores. Our performance tuned Adobe Creative Cloud workstations are the fastest way to accelerate this process.

GPUs: A GPU of any type does not assist the actual encoding process (outputting a file to your computer), however, it can improve the processing speed of some effects prior to encoding. In some cases when exporting, the GPU is barely used for acceleration, if at all, when GPU accelerated effects aren’t used.

Multiple GPUs: Both applications won’t see much benefit from multiple GPUs when scrubbing and editing footage in the timeline, but Premiere Pro can certainly benefit from multiple GPUs if your workflow makes use of the Mercury Playback Engine’s GPU-accelerated effects and footage scaling. 

For more information refer to this article from Adobe.