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Quad Core Notebooks & CS5
Nearly a year ago we started a thread that is still popping about Quad Core and Premiere Pro. Over the year it developed as manufacturers of hardware and software jockeyed for position in the new era of 64-bit Content production.
So as a response to the latest question posed by Laura Petrella at who asked “I am looking to get a laptop to edit Hi def with PPCS5. Do you have any suggestions? I was looking at a Dell…” let me give not brands or models, but specifications as I have gleaned them from friends at Adobe, Addonics, Microsoft regards what would make a state-of-the-art Quad Core notebook.
Processor – i7 Extreme
RAM – 8GB or multiples thereof like 16 or 32
Video Card – Nvidia GeForce CUDA. Note only certain have been qualified as accelerated for CS5. See: The cards that Adobe already qualified are listed on the left side of the page. [Note to Adobe. Please qualify the GeForce 260M. It is installed upon such a wide base of gamer notebooks that meet many of the specs for CS5 perfectly]
Hard Drives – All should be 7200tpm. Notebooks with 2 – 500GB are a good choice.
OS – Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate or MAC Snow Leopard
Display – 1920 x 1080p or 1920 x higher than 1080 if you want to see full HD quality without having to hook to an external monitor.
External Drives – eSATA the bigger the better at of course 7200rpm connection by either ExpressCard, which currently can deliver up to 300MB per second sustained when connected as a RAID 5 according to Addonics.
Alternatively . . . some notebooks are just now coming out with USB 3.0Big deal for us at Videography Lab is that the migration to 64-bit OS and programs is THE time to get clean boxed CD/DVD discs . . . as opposed to upgrades.
Imagine for a second, a crash! You’ve saved all your precious data on either the second internal 500GB drive or the external eSATAs. So you’ve got to rebuild the basic C:/ drive, OS and all programs. It is soooo much easier to put in one OS disc and your up and running. Than reinstall two suites, CS5 and Office 2010 and your notebook is back and ready for prime time.
As an aside, we are now advocating all mail [where possible] in the cloud as well as calendars and Skype. It just makes it a lot easier to move about without having too much non-production overhead on e production notebook. We like to call ours a “videography workstation” 🙂
Hope that help Laura. And I expect others may have some pointers onto specific brands and models that they feel meet the grade?
Even more interesting will be those who see other POVs on what is needed to make a notebook perform with excellence on CS5 Premiere Pro and more importantly with CS5 Master Collection.
Bob
Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com -
2 Replies
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Thank you Mike for filling in the lost links. I don’t know if I just coded those links wrong but they failed to appear in my original post.
A word of caution, based on experience about getting a notebook with specs like the ones I obtained. ASUS the notebook manufacturer that made the gamer book I chose, had a dealer who advertised the notebook prematurely. I put down the money fast to lock in the deal and they ended up trying to back out of the offer. During the “negotiations” that followed they conceded to build my notebook up by adding 2 – 500GB 720rpm HDs in place of the 320GB drives that came stock with the unit.
Today, less than 9 months after purchase, one of the hard drives sounds like a washing machine and is sure to die when I need it most. I called ASUS tech support and they said that they would not support the repair under warranty because the computer had been altered.
The ASUS dealer who sold me the computer never told me that I would not have any warranty and, worse, they seem to have disappeared!
So the moral of this story is to get a reputable dealer or buy direct from a manufacturer who will Customize your notebook and put it under extended warranty. “Better safe than sorry”.
Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com
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