laptop for Resolve – PC or Mac
updated 1 year, 3 months ago 3 Members · 3
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I am looking, once again, to upgrade my editing laptop. Does anyone have real-world experience with a fast, capable, reliable laptop computer for Resolve?
Mac or PC – doesn’t matter. Budget is probably not a limiting factor. Reliability and smooth playback are paramount. My current system (based on a 2014 MacBook Pro) stutters and loses frames during playback of timelines of multi-layer HD files, necessitating much rendering.
Thanks!
Bob C
From my experience most fo the bottleneck in speed is your storage device.
I am not sure how PCs fair as far as mobiles go but I’ve had great luck for the longest time with my 2008 Uni MBP. Now, of course, thats long gone now but at the time, I could not find a PC replacement for Resolve 8/9.
To date, I am using a mid-2015 for R14 and thats been great on and offset.
I only Thunderbolt devices such as GTECHs and for DIT a Sonnet with RAID SSDs on a PCI card.
Worked with mostly RED files but on occasion some ARRI and Sony MXFs.
You still need to do the leg work to get things to work smoothly but heck it works.
I want to check out the new HP Z laptops but there are none to touch in my neck of the woods ☹
Now if I had a choice I would only work on desktops.
There are new laptops with RTX 2080 GPUs that are fast as hell, assuming you get a fast CPU and lots of RAM:
https://www.techwalls.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-laptops/
A top-of-the-line current MacBook Pro with TB3 connections and an eGPU can be very fast as well. I’m hoping there will be a forthcoming 16″ MacBook Pro, which could be good for Resolve dailies.
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