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You know the error. Four nodes into a grade, you flip on Magic Mask, and Resolve throws “GPU Memory Full” at you like it’s your fault. Or the edit page plays a clip just fine while the color page drops the same clip to 9 fps. Resolve isn’t slow software. It’s the fastest NLE I’ve ever used when the hardware under it is right… and the most dramatic one when it isn’t.
If you edit on Windows and you’re asking what the best PC for video editing is, this is the guide: three complete builds at three budgets, plus the prebuilt towers worth buying if you’d rather not build. DaVinci Resolve is the benchmark workload throughout, because it’s the NLE that punishes a wrong build the hardest and because Puget Systems publishes dated numbers for it. It’s also the Resolve sibling of my Premiere Pro hardware guide. Same mission, different physics: Premiere leans hardest on the CPU, Resolve leans hardest on the GPU, and a machine built for one wastes money on the other. Every price was live on Amazon or Best Buy on October 26, 2026, and every performance claim links to a published Puget Systems benchmark with a date on it. Still deciding which NLE to build around in the first place? Start with the software comparison, then come back.
One thing before you spend a dollar: if your current machine mostly works and playback is the complaint, read my proxy workflow guide first. A proxy pipeline costs nothing and fixes more Resolve pain than a new GPU. Everything below assumes you’ve already ruled that out.
Build or buy?
Build or buy is the first fork, so take it first. A prebuilt makes sense when you have no weekend to give the build, when you want one warranty on one box instead of eight parts from eight vendors, or, the big one in 2026, when you can’t get the graphics card. On October 26 the Amazon RTX 5080 listing I track had no buy box at all, and Amazon’s own RTX 5060 Ti 16GB listing was showing a renewed unit, while Best Buy would sell me a finished tower with a new 5070 Ti or 5080 already inside. The card shortage is the strongest case a prebuilt has ever had with me.
The build wins on the things a spec sheet hides. The mid build sits on a board with four DIMM slots and leaves two empty for the day the memory market breaks; 32GB in a prebuilt is what you get until you open the case and count sticks. VRAM per dollar leans the same way at the bottom of the market. 16GB of VRAM is my floor for grading, the Tier 1 build gets you there for about $2,600, and the cheapest Best Buy tower that clears the same bar is the $2,899.99 iBUYPOWER Trace. The $1,959.99 OMEN 35L under it carries 12GB of VRAM and 16GB of RAM, and $640 more buys the Tier 1 build with 16GB on the card, double the RAM, and a second drive.
Storage is the quieter difference. Every tower below ships with one 2TB drive doing OS, cache, and media at once; the builds split those jobs across two or three drives, and the cache drive is the one that changes how a timeline plays. At the top, the money flips: the $3,299.99 iBUYPOWER Slate puts an RTX 5080 in your hands for about $2,150 less than the Tier 2 build around the same card. That gap is 64GB of RAM instead of 32GB (the 64GB kit alone is $994.99 today), two more drives, 10GbE on the board, and the CPU that topped Puget’s chart.
My rule: build if you’ll keep the machine five years and expect to add memory along the way, buy the Trace if you need to be cutting next week, and either way read the next four sections, because they’re what you’re checking the prebuilt against.
Where the money goes in a Resolve build
Puget Systems rebuilt their benchmark suite in February 2026, and the headline of the Bench 2.0 analysis is the ordering: the GPU now impacts performance more than the CPU, at least in the upper tier of enthusiast parts. That matches what Resolve does all day. The color page, noise reduction, Magic Mask, scopes, most of the AI tools… all of it runs on the graphics card.
So the budget order for a Resolve box in 2026 is GPU first, RAM second, storage third, CPU almost last. How much of that second line Resolve uses, and where Fusion changes the answer, is in how much RAM you need for video editing. If that reads backwards to you, good. Gaming builds trained everyone to overspend on the processor, and the memory market just made that mistake expensive: a 64GB DDR5 kit now costs more than the CPU I’m about to recommend. We’ll get to that.
The CPU: the $316 chip won
In March 2026 Puget tested Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus refresh against the full Ryzen 9000 stack, and the result rearranged my recommendation: the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was the fastest CPU they tested in overall DaVinci Resolve performance. Not fastest per dollar, fastest outright: it beat the $700 Ryzen 9 9950X3D by 1%, its own bigger siblings the 285K and 265K by 3%, and the 9700X by 11%. It costs $316.07, and Amazon itself stocks it now.
The breakdown holds up everywhere it matters. Intraframe codecs (ProRes, DNx, the formats you finish on): about 5% ahead of the other high-end parts. RAW: within a hair of the flagships and 30% ahead of the 9700X. Fusion: a 2% spread across the whole top of the stack, so no CPU purchase moves that needle much. And if you want a second opinion, look at what the benchmark authors sell. Puget’s own Resolve workstation ships with this exact $316 chip, while their Threadripper config starts at $12,713.
“What about H.264 and HEVC? Isn’t that where Intel’s Quick Sync wins?” In Puget’s testing, LongGOP playback is accelerated by the discrete GPU when one is present, so performance is identical across CPUs. Every build on this page has a 50-series card doing that decode. Quick Sync matters in a machine without a capable GPU, like a laptop or a mini PC… not here. Buy the 270K Plus because it tops the chart; the GPU already covers decode.
For the budget tier, the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus runs $215.00, with stock thin enough that Amazon showed one unit left when I checked, and Puget measured it 9% ahead of the 245K, “nearly matching the 9900X3D.” That’s a $215 chip trading blows with a $600 one, on the same platform with the same board options.
Team red? The Ryzen 9 9950X (around $500 street) and 9950X3D ($699) are great chips and lose almost nothing here. The 9950X3D finished 1% behind the 270K Plus… at more than twice the price. If you already own an AM5 board, or you want AMD’s longer socket runway, take the 9950X and skip this argument entirely. On a fresh build, the Intel chip frees up $180 to $380 that this market will make you spend on memory anyway.
And Threadripper? Skip it for Resolve. Bench 2.0’s added GPU-dependent tests dropped its ranking, and Fusion prefers frequency over core count. If your day is heavy Fusion 3D and simulation work, that’s a different machine, and I built it in the VFX workstation guide.
The GPU does the work
Resolve treats your graphics card as the primary processor: every node, every temporal NR pass, every Magic Mask track runs there. Two numbers decide the purchase, and only one of them is printed on the box in big letters.
First, VRAM. The internet swears 4K grading needs 24GB. Puget’s published minimums are a lot lower:
| Resolution | Puget’s minimum VRAM |
|---|---|
| 1080p | 8GB |
| 4K | 12GB |
| 6K/8K | 20GB+ |
I spec 16GB as the working floor anyway, because noise reduction and Magic Mask pull from the same pool as your timeline, and filling that pool is how you end up with the error from the intro. What you should not buy is 8GB. Puget’s Bench 2.0 verdict on the 8GB RTX 5060, in their words: “8 GB is simply not enough VRAM to keep up with modern video editing workflows.”
Second, forget the second card. Resolve’s free edition only uses one GPU, and even Studio gains almost nothing: Puget’s v20 GPU scaling analysis measured the overall score within 6% whether the test rig ran one, two, or three GPUs, and, their words again, “you can’t ‘pool’ VRAM across cards in Resolve.” One strong card with enough memory beats any pair of weaker ones.
The picks, one per tier. Budget: the ASUS Dual RTX 5060 Ti 16GB at around $770 to $790 new, and check the seller: Amazon’s own listing was showing a renewed unit on October 26. The “16GB” in that name is the entire reason it’s here; the 8GB 5060 costs less and fails the job. Mid: the PNY RTX 5080 at $1,849.99, sold by Best Buy itself and up $150 since September; the Amazon 5080 listing I track had no buy box at all on October 26. That price puts the step up from the ZOTAC RTX 5070 Ti ($1,299.99) at $550. Both carry 16GB and both are terrific Resolve cards, so if that $550 is the difference between building now and not building, take the 5070 Ti and feel zero regret. I take the 5080. Top: the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090, which was $6,899.99 from a marketplace seller in late September (Amazon itself doesn’t sell a 5090) and had no buy box at all on October 26; 5090 cards sit at $4,500 to $7,000 depending on the week. In 5090 land a live buy box is half the spec sheet, so check who is selling before you order. It is the best card you can put in a Resolve machine: Puget’s hardware recommendations rate it “performing about on par with three RTX 4090 GPUs,” and its 32GB clears the 20GB+ gate for 6K and 8K work.
If you want the full card-by-card shootout, I ran it in the GPU guide. This post just takes its own advice. Black Friday targets for every card in it are on Black Friday GPU deals for video editors.
RAM: the line item that ate the build
In October 2025, a 64GB DDR5-6000 kit ran about $180. The same class of kit today: $994.99, and even that one comes from a marketplace seller now rather than Amazon itself. The AI datacenter buildout is eating the DRAM supply, DDR5 prices have climbed more than fivefold in under a year, and any parts list priced before that is out of date.
Here’s Puget’s RAM guidance next to what following it costs on October 26, 2026:
| Footage | Puget’s minimum RAM | What that costs, October 26, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p | 64GB | $994.99 |
| 4K | 96GB | $1,459.99 to $1,649.99 (the cheap end is slower DDR5-5200) |
| 6K | 128GB | $1,832.91 |
| 8K | 192GB | I’m not pricing these. Extrapolate from the row above, then go lie down. |
| 12K | 256GB |
Puget’s 6K minimum, in memory alone, costs more than the GPU and CPU in the budget build at the bottom of this page, combined. Puget specs workstations, not budgets, and their targets are still correct… as targets. Nobody should treat them as an October 2026 shopping list.
So here’s how I’m playing it: buy a two-stick kit, buy a board with four DIMM slots, and leave two slots empty for the day this market breaks. Slot count is a real buying criterion right now, which is why the motherboard section below cares about it. For the budget tier that means the TeamGroup T-Force Vulcan 32GB DDR5-6000 kit at $489.99. Yes, 32GB sits under Puget’s own 64GB floor, and I’m recommending it anyway, because at this tier the alternative is feeding your GPU budget to the memory market. Lean on the cache drive, lean on proxies, add a second kit later. For everything above budget: the Corsair Vengeance RGB RS 64GB DDR5-6000 at $994.99.
96GB is where I’d love to point finishing builds, and right now that pricing is hostile: the kit I used to recommend vanished from sale, the cheapest live 96GB kit is $1,459.99 at DDR5-5200, and matching this platform’s speed starts near $1,650. Set a price alert on 96GB and wait. And 128GB, Puget’s 6K number, is $1,832.91, which is within $20 of what the PNY RTX 5080 in the mid build costs.
Storage: three drives, three jobs
Puget doesn’t spec a hero drive for Resolve; they spec a layout: one drive for the OS and apps, one for cache and scratch, one for media. Speed matters most on exactly one of them, and it isn’t the one people usually spend on.
The OS drive is the easy slot. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1TB has been my default answer here, with a warning attached: it went from about $165 to $249.99 inside two weeks this summer, and it has since eased only to $237.00, from a marketplace seller this time. NAND caught the same cold as DRAM. If it’s north of $250 when you look, any name-brand 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive does this job fine.
The cache drive is where speed pays. Render cache, optimized media, scratch: this drive gets hammered all day, so it’s the one that gets the PCIe 5.0 money. The Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB sits at $415.61, up $16 since September, and kept its first-party listing.
Media is the twist. Puget’s own line is that high-bitrate footage, around 2,000 Mbps and up, “is typically the only time” your media needs to live on NVMe. Most codecs you’ll cut never saturate a good PCIe 4.0 drive, so the Samsung 990 Pro 2TB at $389.99 covers the media role with room to spare. The part that costs real money in 2026 is capacity, not drive speed: the 4TB 990 Pro has slipped to third-party sellers at $989.99, so the sane split is 2TB of internal media plus a server or archive tier for everything cold.
Two more things before the builds. Don’t edit off a portable USB drive… they’re for offload and backup, and Puget says the same thing in more polite words. There’s more to drive roles than one section can hold; the full breakdown (what goes where, when SATA is fine, how the cache drive changes playback) is in the drive-roles guide.
The motherboard: buy slots, get networking free
For the mid and top tiers I’m pointing at one board: the ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi at about $450 to $550 depending on the week. The case for it reads like this build’s wishlist: four DIMM slots for the staged RAM plan, five M.2 slots for the three-drive split with room left over, Thunderbolt 5, and onboard 10GbE plus 2.5GbE networking. That last one is the sleeper feature. A 10GbE add-in card is a $100+ purchase and a PCIe slot; here it’s included, which means this machine plugs straight into shared storage at full speed. If you run, or are planning, an editing server, the board’s premium mostly evaporates.
Building AMD instead? The ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi is the same idea on AM5, though Amazon currently lists no offers on it at all.
The budget tier skips the ProArt. A four-DIMM B860 board around $170, like the ASUS Prime B860-PLUS WiFi, does the job. Confirm the CPU support list includes the 200S Plus chips before ordering (the refresh is new enough that shipping BIOS versions vary), and note it has two M.2 slots, which matches the two-drive budget build below.
Power and cooling, real quick, using NVIDIA’s own required-system-power numbers: 600W for the 5060 Ti, 850W for the 5080, 1000W for the 5090. Translate that to a quality 750W ATX 3.1 unit with a native 12V-2×6 connector for tier one, and 1,000W for tiers two and three. A $40 tower cooler keeps any CPU on this page happy, and the case is the one part where I have no opinion… buy the one you can stand to look at for five years.
Free Resolve or Studio?
The free edition runs every build here, and since free Resolve only uses one GPU and these are all single-GPU machines, you give up nothing structural. DaVinci Resolve Studio is $295 and belongs in the budget from the mid tier up; the features Blackmagic ships these days land there first, and I walked through the current state of it in the Resolve 21 piece. Before you buy the bare licence, look at the Speed Editor bundle… it’s been the smarter route to a Studio key for a while.
The builds
Three machines. Prices are what each part sold for on a live listing on October 26, 2026; they will drift, memory fastest of all.
Tier 1: the timeline machine (about $2,600)
| Part | Pick | Street price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus | $215.00 |
| GPU | ASUS Dual RTX 5060 Ti 16GB | $770 to $790 (new) |
| RAM | TeamGroup T-Force Vulcan 32GB DDR5-6000 | $489.99 |
| Motherboard | ASUS Prime B860-PLUS WiFi (4 DIMM slots) | $169.99 |
| OS drive | Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1TB | $237.00 |
| Media + cache | Samsung 990 Pro 2TB | $389.99 |
Core parts land near $2,290 with the GPU at the top of its range. Add a 750W supply, a cooler, and a case and you’re near $2,600 running the free edition. This machine cuts 4K H.264/H.265 all day and takes a real grade. For scale, the only other Resolve build guide I found publishing real prices starts its one and only build at $5,987… a 16GB GPU and sane part choices get you on the timeline for under half that. The compromises are on the label: 32GB of RAM (add a kit later), and two drives instead of three, with cache living beside media.
Tier 2: the one most editors should build (about $5,450)
| Part | Pick | Street price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus | $316.07 |
| GPU | PNY RTX 5080 16GB | $1,849.99 (Best Buy) |
| RAM | Corsair Vengeance RGB RS 64GB DDR5-6000 | $994.99 |
| Motherboard | ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi | $450 to $550 |
| OS drive | Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1TB | $237.00 |
| Cache drive | Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB | $415.61 |
| Media drive | Samsung 990 Pro 2TB | $389.99 |
| Software | DaVinci Resolve Studio | $295 |
Core parts plus the licence come to about $5,000, with the board swinging it $50 either way; with a 1,000W supply, a proper cooler, and a case you’re around $5,450. Want to trim it? The ZOTAC RTX 5070 Ti saves $550, keeps the same 16GB of VRAM, and gives up nothing Puget flags as decisive. That’s the trim I’d make first.
Puget sells the comparable machine, same CPU, same GPU class, 96GB of RAM included, for about $4,900 at this writing. Build this list today and you land above that number with 32GB less memory, because RAM and GPU prices have climbed since the summer. So why build, if not for price? Part selection, four RAM slots you control, 10GbE on the board, and $550 of GPU choice. If none of that moves you, buying the Puget box is a defensible answer, and the Best Buy towers below are the cheaper version of the same call.
Tier 3: the finishing room (call it $10,500)
| Part | Pick | Street price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus | $316.07 |
| GPU | ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 32GB | $6,899.99 (3P, September) |
| RAM | Corsair Vengeance RGB RS 64GB DDR5-6000 (start here; see below) | $994.99 |
| Motherboard | ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi | $450 to $550 |
| OS drive | Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1TB | $237.00 |
| Cache drive | Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB | $415.61 |
| Media drive | Samsung 990 Pro 2TB | $389.99 |
| Software | DaVinci Resolve Studio | $295 |
Yes, the CPU line is unchanged from tier two, and that is the finding of the whole guide: Puget’s data gives you no Resolve reason to spend past the $316 chip until you’re in $12,000 Threadripper territory, and Bench 2.0 weakened even that case. The 5090’s 32GB clears Puget’s 20GB+ gate for 6K and 8K, and the leftover budget fights the memory market: start at 64GB, set that 96GB price alert, and if kits come back to earth, two more sticks make this a true Puget-spec finishing machine. Media capacity is the other worthwhile upgrade… the 4TB 990 Pro runs $989.99 through third-party sellers right now, or push cold media to the server instead.
The prebuilts worth buying
Three towers, all sold by Best Buy itself with an Add to Cart button on October 26, 2026. I skipped marketplace sellers and anything listed as coming soon, and I measure each one against the builds above, since that’s what the builds are for.
Budget tower: HP OMEN 35L (RTX 5070, 16GB) at $1,959.99
The HP OMEN 35L is the cheapest Best Buy tower with a current-generation card: a Core i7-14700F, an RTX 5070 with 12GB, 16GB of DDR5, and a 1TB drive for $1,959.99, down from $2,449.99. Two things come with that price. 12GB of VRAM meets Puget’s 4K minimum and sits under my 16GB floor, so Magic Mask and temporal NR on a 4K timeline will bring you closer to the error from the intro than I’d like. And 16GB of RAM is half of what the Tier 1 build carries and a quarter of Puget’s 1080p number, so budget a second kit from day one. The Tier 1 build costs $640 more and fixes both, which is why I’d still build at this price if I had the weekend.
If you want this tier with the RAM problem already solved, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 (Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 5070, 32GB, 1TB) is $2,099.99 and the 32GB version of the OMEN 35L is $2,299.99, both sold by Best Buy. Both still carry the 12GB card, so the VRAM problem stands.
The one to buy: iBUYPOWER Trace (RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB, 2TB) at $2,899.99
The iBUYPOWER Trace is the prebuilt I’d buy: a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an RTX 5070 Ti with 16GB, 32GB of DDR5, and a 2TB drive for $2,899.99. The card is the one I call the smart trim in Tier 2, and it clears the 16GB floor with the same margin the 5080 has. The CPU is an AMD gaming chip rather than my Intel pick, which matters less in Resolve than anywhere else because the card does the heavy work. Against the builds it lands between tiers: $300 more than Tier 1 for a stronger GPU and the same 32GB of RAM, and about $2,550 less than Tier 2, giving up the 5080, half the memory, two of the three drives, and the ProArt board’s 10GbE. If you cut 4K H.264 and HEVC with proxies in the pipeline, that’s a trade I’d make.
The step up: iBUYPOWER Slate (RTX 5080, 32GB, 2TB) at $3,299.99
The iBUYPOWER Slate puts the Tier 2 card, an RTX 5080 with 16GB, in a finished tower for $3,299.99, alongside a Ryzen 9 7900X, 32GB of DDR5, and a 2TB drive. The CPU is a generation older than the Trace’s, and in a GPU-first application it’s the part I’d worry about least. What you’re weighing is the Slate against the Tier 2 build at about $5,450. The $2,150 difference buys 64GB of RAM instead of 32GB, a three-drive layout with a PCIe 5.0 cache drive, 10GbE on the board, and the chip that topped Puget’s chart. If you grade 4K all day and want 64GB this year, build Tier 2. If 32GB holds your timelines for now, the Slate is the cheaper road to a 5080, and on October 26 it was the easier one to buy.
There’s no 5090 tower on this list. Best Buy had none I could buy on October 26, and for a 5090 prebuilt I’d go to Puget Systems or a boutique builder who publishes the exact parts list. Puget’s 5080-class Resolve system, the one I compare Tier 2 against, starts at about $4,900 at this writing, and the 5090 configurations climb from there.
Should you just wait?
For the CPU: no. Intel’s Nova Lake and AMD’s Zen 6 both slipped to around CES 2027, so nothing new is coming to save you this year, and the current chips are the chips. For the GPU, the 50-series Super refresh story hasn’t improved since I covered it in the GPU guide; don’t plan around it.
RAM is the one place waiting has a case. Prices this distorted can un-distort, and a build that leaves two DIMM slots open is already a bet that they will. And if your current machine still plays your timelines, the strongest move in this market is the smallest one: a $416 cache drive, a proxy pipeline, and patience. For a lot of you, that’s the right call. Not sure where your machine stands? Run PugetBench for Resolve on it and compare against the public results before you spend a dime.
In conclusion
And that’s it! Three builds, three towers you can buy instead, one $316 CPU, and a memory market I hope reads this and feels bad. The short version: buy the GPU for the VRAM, buy the board for the slots, put the fast drive under your cache, and let Puget’s numbers tell you where the performance lives. As always, this is what works for me, my clients, and my crew… your codecs, deadlines, and tolerance for RGB may vary. If you’re stuck between tiers, or your parts quote came out different, leave a comment and I’ll talk you through it. Premiere folks, your version of this guide lives here. The storage section above is the short version; the drive-roles guide has the full breakdown.
