Would this computer be adequate for video editing?

[D. Eric franks]

Two different questions here, first the easy one:

The CostCo machine is going to be better. Bigger screen. Faster renders. I’d bet better battery life.

The second question concerning whether it’s adequate for video? Well, yes, adequate. But, quite frankly, if you simply had $1,000 to buy a video editing machine, it is going to pale in comparison to $1,000 thrown at a desktop with a 24″ monitor. Are you really going to need to edit on the road? There are some people that do, like wedding/event producers that need to compile a quickie montage by the end of the day at the reception, but the vast majority of us end up tied to the wall (batteries) and, as you note, external drives anyhow. Laptops are just miserable to edit on, in terms of screen size, interface touchpads, performance and price, to be perfectly honest.

[Kris Zimbelman]

I need to rephrase the question somewhat. I will be using an external monitor( and possibly the laptop’s in a 2 monitor situation).It has to be a laptop as I need a portable computer for speech recognition
( Both of these are very adequate for that purpose). I like the Asus better because it has a better reputation for reliability. It also has a 1 gb video card vs 512mb which I hope might make up some of the difference in processor speed. So I guess what I need to know is, will the Dell be 20% faster in processing different HD formats. If so I would have to go with it.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro

[D. Eric franks]

OK, wild guess time: The machines will be equally fast while editing (both will run at 2.8 GHz when asked to do so), but the 4-core/8-thread i7 chip will be many times faster than the dual-core CPU for apps that take advantage of it, for example (or when voice dictating and editing at the same time – which you’ll probably never do!), I would expect rendering to be a lot faster, maybe even twice as fast. Rendering isn’t everything for most workflows, however, so this might not be that big of a deal.