Re: Budget hardware upgrade options

Far as I have heard, After Effects does not render using the GPU of the graphics card. It is RAM and more RAM. Best to confirm at the Cow's After Effects forum. The guys who render heavily with After Effects are all over there.

The only other thing that could be bogging you down are your hard-disks. They are the slowest parts of your system, especially being used as scratch disks. All that write and retrieve would definitely slow you down. Not much choice here - SSD drives for their quick reads and writes, but the quantity of writes would depreciate the performance of the SSD earlier. Perhaps consider a cheap 60GB SSD as scratch disk for After Effects. They are around the US$100+ mark.