“Good” Laptop specs

[Michael Kash]

Something like this?

Full HD, Intel Core i7-8750H, NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, 1TB HDD + 16GB Intel Optane Storage,

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Kash] “Full HD, Intel Core i7-8750H, NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, 1TB HDD + 16GB Intel Optane Storage,”

Looks good!

I was holding off to see if anyone else made a suggestion because I moved to Mac a few years ago and I currently have a 2018 MacBook Pro with a 6 core Intel Core-7, 32GB memory, and 1TB SSD drive. It’s a killer video editing laptop that process 4K like butter but I use Final Cut Pro X (was a Vegas Pro user before that).

I would suggest any gaming laptop. Usually the specs for fast gaming and video editing are the same. I believe that the laptop you posted uses the same CPU as mine so it should be a great performer. The most important thing you can do is get the fastest CPU that you can afford. So much of video editing comes down to CPU performance and then GPU performance.

I think that laptop is a good pick.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Michael Kash]

Thanks John and gaming laptops were exactly what I was looking at. Figured most run fast CPU’s and good quality video cards. I kn ow what direction to really look at.

[Michael Kash]

Here are the specs from the Dell G3 17″. Solid state main drive with 1tb secondary .

8th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-8750H Processor

Windows 10 Home 64bit English

8GB, 2x4GB, DDR4, 2666MHz

NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 with NVIDIA® Max Q Design technology, 6GB GDDR5 video memory

[Aaron Star]

There is a “2018 Dell XPS 9570” that seems to have a dell logo vs a Mac logo on amazon.

The general rule of thumb with CPU cores is 4GB of RAM per core. Even if you are of the opinion that “Vegas” is only using 8-16GB, the extra memory will be used by Windows. Mac and Windows do not have the same memory management systems. So the 32GB model would be the version to get with 6 cores.

Mobile CPUs do not have the same performance levels as desktop CPUs. Do your research.

Compare system performance with WinSAT from an admin command prompt with “winsat -v formal” This will give you stats on the machine that include GPU memory bandwidth, CPU performance, and raw memory bandwidth.

1050 Ti Mobile GPU – While the FP stats of the 1050 today are respectable when compared to desktops of 5-10 years ago, its performance is more inline with the AMD R9 290 era.

Laptops are thermally reduced in power levels to fit inside a very tight package, a package that will have very small fans to remove heat during long renders. Just something to think about unless you really need portability.

4GB of GPU memory – There are people on this site that believe you only need enough V-Ram to support your resolution, This is horribly out of date thinking. Today the GPU is shared and performing many things at once. You want the most GPU RAM you can get with the highest memory bit interface and bandwidth. If you plan on doing any amount of Resolve on the laptop, 8GB is the minimum for 4K in Resolve. 4GB on the GPU will pretty much make the laptop an HD machine. Also the 1050 Ti Mobile compares to GPUs from 5 years ago.

Optane…..Maybe if the device comes with it. Beyond that, NVME running on M.2 storage. The M specifies 4x PCIe interface which far exceeds SATA, SAS, or thunderbolt speeds. Run your projects from M.2 storage, then long term store old projects to slower external media. If your laptop has an available 2nd M.2 drive, upgrade that before going to external space.

Do you research on Dell M.2 drives, as the one they give you may not be as reliable as a latest generation Samsung. I have had corporate Dell m.2 SSDs fail due to overheating and being of 1st generation devices. All device manufacturers choose the best item deal vs best in class, including Apple.

Drive image backup your load with Arconis as soon as you get things the way you want.

Interestingly Final Cut and Vegas <14 pretty much had the same resource requirements in terms of OpenCL support, CPU and RAM. Today Vegas 15+ also takes advantage of additional NVidia GPU components to accelerate certain video formats. AMD now seems to be on the outs with Magix developers, even though AMD also has similar onboard tech.