Which laptop would be better for AE?

[Kevin Camp]

most of the specs for ae use lean toward the acer… faster cpu, faster and larger front side bus and larger drive.

the only thing that is listed in the toshiba’s favor is that it states that the ram is upgradable to 8gb. the acer doesn’t mention the max upgradable ram, so yo umight ask specifically about that (or maybe check acer’s site for more thorough specs). it’s not a deal breaker, bnut the option to expand ram is nice.

the basic order of importance for ae performance for any system is about like this:

1. cpu — both speed and number of cores
2. ram — with cs3-4 ae can use up to 4gb per core with mp enabled. with more ram you’ll be able to feed data to your cores more efficiently.
3. speedy drives — with faster drives (particularly drive arrays) you’ll feed more footage data more quickly to help feed those extra cores. both laptops come with an esata port, that will be your fastest external interface (barring a pcmcia expansion card) so you could put all your media/renders on an external sata drive and enable disk caching on the main drive to improve performance.
4. gpu (a distant forth) — more effects are starting to use the gpu in ae, but it is still primarily to accelerate preview interactions, not renders, and many users still disable opengl all together in favor of stability.

   Kevin Camp
   Senior Designer
   KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Chris Lenart]

Thanks for the reply!
So are you saying that since those laptops have dual cores, if I expanded to 8 GB of RAM after effects could use all 8? I read somewhere it only could use 3 GB

[Kevin Camp]

ae is only 32-bit, so as a single foreground process ae can only grab about 3.5gb.

however with ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ enabled in the multiprocessing prefs, ae will launch a render engine for each available core, with each core being able to grab 4gb of ram (background processes can grab the full 4gb).

you can still use mp in ae with 2 cores and 4gb, but if you want to work in hd often, you’d like to get 8gb. that’s really the only thing that i saw in toshiba’s favor, and even with that, i think i’d lean towards the acer. the faster procs and larger/faster frontside bus is a big plus.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Chris Lenart]

That explains a lot, thanks for the advice!