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What hardware do you use for DaVinci Resolve

Rojillio Santoro

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I heard a lot of people here use this for video editing, however I was unable to run it on my PC. Someone at Black Magic Design told me they recommend a minimum of 6GB of video RAM. I believe graphics cards with that much RAM run $500-$1000 and about the only other software that needs that kind of graphics muscle are games which I'm not interested in. I'm planning to build a new PC or perhaps dump Windows and buy a Mac. Is DaVinci worth the hardware investment?
 
TL;DR: Read the next-to-last paragraph
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That's a question only you can answer. The answer for me was 'yes', but it involved a few not-inexpensive upgrades to what started out as a pretty decent machine with an 8-core Intel i7-6700 CPU @3.4GHz. The bullets are in the order of how much performance improvement each had for Resolve:
  • Installed a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD as my boot device; this is also where programs--including Davinci Resolve--are installed.
  • Upgraded RAM from 16GB to 24GB
  • Upgraded graphics card from an NVIDIA Quadro K620 w/ 2GB RAM to a NVIDIA GForce GTX 1660 w/ 6GB RAM.
    • The GTX 1660 board required a new power supply; the stock power supply had insufficient capacity. Also, it had an unusual (Dell-ish) motherboard connector that demanded a special adapter to mate the new power supply to the motherboard. Amazon to the rescue!
  • Installed a slow 4TB internal drive and a fast 4TB external drive for long-term storage; these 4K videos suck unbelievable amounts of disk space!
At this point, the machine is pretty good. I'm happy with the performance; scrubbing through video is smooth while editing, and I rarely encounter lags of any kind. Another 8GB of RAM on the motherboard would be good, and another 4GB of graphics RAM would be better, but really only to boost speed when rendering the final MP4. The editing experience is a dream.

So to satisfy my perfectionism, Davinci Resolve is worth the hardware investment. And once you're that far, the full-blown software is a niggling extra, so yeah, I'd say go full Monty on it. You can start easy with DR, accepting all the defaults and so on. If and as you want to do more, you can. And whether or not you ever create a video project worthy of Cannes or Sundance, you will simply never outgrow Resolve.

But that's just me. You have your own budget and other criteria, and there are many good answers to video editing hardware/software systems. I'm sure you'll wind up with a system that makes you happy, because you're doing your homework first.
 
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Davinci Resolve runs fine on my system : old z77 motherboard , i5 2400 cpu , 16 gb ram , I do have SSD 's now and a new graphics card -- rx 580 with 8gb of ram ( less than $ 300 )
 
TL;DR: Read the next-to-last paragraph
------------------
That's a question only you can answer. The answer for me was 'yes', but it involved a few not-inexpensive upgrades to what started out as a pretty decent machine with an 8-core Intel i7-6700 CPU @3.4GHz. The bullets are in the order of how much performance improvement each had for Resolve:
  • Installed a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD as my boot device; this is also where programs--including Davinci Resolve--are installed.
  • Upgraded RAM from 16GB to 24GB
  • Upgraded graphics card from an NVIDIA Quadro K620 w/ 2GB RAM to a NVIDIA GForce GTX 1660 w/ 6GB RAM.
    • The GTX 1660 board required a new power supply; the stock power supply had insufficient capacity. Also, it had an unusual (Dell-ish) motherboard connector that demanded a special adapter to mate the new power supply to the motherboard. Amazon to the rescue!
  • Installed a slow 4TB internal drive and a fast 4TB external drive for long-term storage; these 4K videos suck unbelievable amounts of disk space!
At this point, the machine is pretty good. I'm happy with the performance; scrubbing through video is smooth while editing, and I rarely encounter lags of any kind. Another 8GB of RAM on the motherboard would be good, and another 4GB of graphics RAM would be better, but really only to boost speed when rendering the final MP4. The editing experience is a dream.

So to satisfy my perfectionism, Davinci Resolve is worth the hardware investment. And once you're that far, the full-blown software is a niggling extra, so yeah, I'd say go full Monty on it. You can start easy with DR, accepting all the defaults and so on. If and as you want to do more, you can. And whether or not you ever create a video project worthy of Cannes or Sundance, you will simply never outgrow Resolve.

But that's just me. You have your own budget and other criteria, and there are many good answers to video editing hardware/software systems. I'm sure you'll wind up with a system that makes you happy, because you're doing your homework first.
It sounds like the guy at Black Magic exaggerated the VRAM requirement somewhat if you were getting by with 2GB and upgrading to 6 is 3rd on your list. I read an article on building video editing PC that said Davinci requires lots of VRAM, rather than system RAM.
 
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It sounds like the guy at Black Magic exaggerated the VRAM requirement somewhat if you were getting by with 2GB and upgrading to 6 is 3rd on your list. I read an article on building video editing PC that said Davinci requires lots of VRAM, rather than system RAM.
With Davinci Resolve, you'll never have an excess of either VRAM or system RAM; it'll sop up whatever you have. The more you have, the better your experience will be, which is not to say you have to max your system out on either.
 
If I decide to go to the dark side, is anyone here using a Mac?
Not so much a dark side, but a dark silver side. I use a 2019 Macbook Pro and a Windows 10 machine interchangeably for video editing.
 
If I decide to go to the dark side, is anyone here using a Mac?

In my experience, it doesn’t matter what OS you run DaVinci on. Like others have said, just feed it as much RAM and Video RAM as you can and in my case, upgrading to a processor that had had on-chip h265 decoding also helped a bunch. Good luck!
 
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