Our editing setup stopped working at the worst time – a Next Day RTX PC came to the rescue
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Any editor, graphic designer, animator, or other technical creative, knows only too well the feeling of having an imminent deadline to hit and your hardware suddenly stops working. The mind races as the panic sets in, beads of sweat start forming, and you clasp your hands to your head as you try and come up with a solution. Worst of all is when your entire PC gives up the ghost for no discernible reason, and you need to find a replacement fast!
Fortunately, when this recently happened to our creative team, AWD-IT had us covered: the online PC system configurator delivered a powerful prebuilt machine to our door the following day, packing an NVIDIA RTX 5070 graphics card, which enables the latest generative AI and RTX enhancements to our workflows. Flexing our new creative muscles, our team got to grips with its performance with a variety of creative software, including RTX and AI-accelerated effects in Adobe Premiere Pro and Capcut. Read below for all the details!
Unboxing AWD-IT's next-day PC
After our PC arrived promptly, we couldn't wait to get our hands on it. Inside the large main box was a smaller box containing the prebuilt itself surrounded by a good amount of interior padding to keep it safe. The rest of the main box contained the boxing for the various components in the PC (graphics card, motherboard etc.) along with their instructions. Also packed were various extra cables, brackets, and screws should we decide to switch out some of the components.
If you select from the specific list of AWD-IT's Next Day Gaming PCs, all of these machines are eligible for next day delivery. To guarantee this you need to order before 1pm and live on the UK Mainland; the PC will then be dispatched that day to arrive the next day.
All PCs come with a comprehensive 3-year warranty, covering parts and returns, which gives buyers some nice piece of mind. Plus, even after the warranty has run out, we're still eligible for lifetime technical support from the AWD-IT team.
Why an RTX 50 Series system is a game changer for creators
All NVIDIA RTX graphics cards have access to NVIDIA Studio – a platform that leverages the performance and features of the GPU when using creative applications. It also brings with it some unique tools like NVIDIA Broadcast, providing some great tools for streaming. All that's needed is an RTX GPU and a few minutes to download the Studio drivers, which provide the optimal experience in top creative apps.
NVIDIA 50 Series GPUs offer the latest and greatest version of this tech, with fifth-gen Tensor Cores — dedicated hardware units on 50 Series cards designed to enhance and accelerate AI workloads further than previous generations. With this, these cards offer increased render speeds, provide faster previews of your work prior to completion, quicker encoding and decoding, and increase the effectiveness of image de-noising and other features.
If you're into game-modding, RTX Remix is NVIDIA's open-sourced platform for remastering classic games using generative AI tools. It allows modders to replace existing game assets with high fidelity versions, and lets them add full ray tracing, DLSS and Reflex technologies, making games which haven't stood the test of time look and feel incredible.
Putting our next day PC to the test
The two creative applications we use most often at PC Guide are Adobe Premiere Pro, for most of our video editing needs, and also Capcut, which we use specifically for TikTok.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Auto Reframe
The Auto Reframe feature streamlines the process of adapting video content to various aspect ratios (including 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16), catering to the diverse requirements of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. This tool uses Adobe Sensei, an AI-driven technology, to automatically identify the subjects in your video and respond to motion, maintaining the focal point of your footage and ensuring that key subjects remain centered.
In our 50 Series setup we noticed that Auto Reframe felt smoother, faster, and more efficient, especially with high-res content or multi-aspect workflows. More specifically we noticed faster analysis of footage, quicker subject detection and motion tracking, and a reduced waiting time when applying Auto Reframe across longer and more complex sequences.
GPU Accelerated effects
Our editors took advantage of numerous RTX-accelerated effects within Premier Pro, which can be identified by the wrench/spanner icon with a lightning bolt. The GPU-accelerated effects gave our editors greater flexibility, with Media Intelligence offering some subtle but impactful assists that streamlined the workflow and enhanced precision. More tools can be found through the search bar and sorting menu. These include myriad blurring effects of different types and sharpening effects like the AI enhanced Unsharp Mask, distortions and stylized vignettes, masking, motion-tracking, animated text, all the different transitions, plus time-based effects like slow motion. Having these additional features are incredibly helpful within a workflow and our editors experienced improved performance and more responsive editing when making their scenes pop in post.
NVENC & NVDEC
NVIDIA RTX GPUs take up much of the work of encoding and decoding from your CPU, with the net result meaning much faster playback and scrubbing of videos within your timeline, and a massive reduction in the time it takes to export videos. While Premiere Pro doesn't yet support 4:2:2 exports, when dealing with 4:2:2 video editing in DaVinci Resolve, 50 Series users can benefit from up to 12 times faster exports compared to CPU-based processing.
50 Series GPUs can handle more simultaneous encode and decode streams, which is better for multicam edits, when using 4K+ resolution footage, or encoding multiple videos in a batch. The NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) on the 50 Series is faster due to improved encoding timelines, higher throughput for codecs like H.264 and HEVC (H.265). NVIDIA Decode (NVDEC) has hardware-level support for the AV1 codec and provides almost instant, lag-free previews and jumping between clips. With this, our editors reduced the time spent fine tuning and making adjustments to their videos, and cut down the time taken to export the final cut.
Capcut
When using Capcut and its various AI-boosted features like the AI Video Upscaler and AI Sticker Generator, we noticed much greater performance with this 50 Series build than what you'd find on an Apple setup for instance. Some standout tech contributing to this efficiency is NVIDIA's ‘Simultaneous Scene Encoding', which enables multiple scenes to be sent to the multi encoders on NVIDIA's high end GPUs, helping speed up exports. This performed very well in conjunction with NVIDIA's dedicated NVENC encoder, dramatically accelerating rendering speeds without compromising quality. The result was the fastest times we've ever seen. Overall, our video export times were reduced significantly, with excellent image quality in the rendered cut.
Other creative applications
We've already mentioned programs like Blender, Autodesk, and Adobe Lightroom, but pretty much the entire Adobe Creative suite benefits from an NVIDIA 50 Series GPU and either its AI acceleration or RTX enhancements, or both. Besides this you also have the editor’s favourite Davinci Resolve, which has even more advanced NVENC & NVDEC improvements than you'd find in Premiere Pro, plus improved face recognition, object tracking, reframing and other features like improved voice isolation, scene cut detection, and depth mapping.
The range of AWD-IT prebuilts
Below we've listed the different NVIDIA RTX 50 Series prebuilts available from AWD-IT, although there are also 40 Series and 30 Series setups available on the Next Day Gaming PC list. Despite the name, these rigs shouldn't be considered as solely ‘gaming machines', as they are equally capable of high-end productivity and creative workflows.
The name of each build refers to the case used in their construction (e.g. the 3500X RGB); the CPU and GPU are then listed after this. Each PC can typically be customised with different memory, storage, and PSU options, as well as accompanying peripherals (mouse, keyboard, monitor), software, and operating system versions. For some you can even change the CPU, GPU, and case to suit your needs and budget.
- AWD-IT 3500X RGB – Ryzen 7 7700X (Eight Core), RTX 5080 (16GB)
- AWD-IT 320R Airflow – Ryzen 5 7600X (Six Core), RTX 5070 Ti (16GB)
- AWD-IT FRAME 4000D – Ryzen 7 5700X (Eight Core), RTX 5070 (12GB)
- AWD-IT Charger – Intel Core i5 14400F (10 Core), RTX 5060 Ti (16GB)
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