2018 Laptop

M

morgan_moore

Major Contributor
My new MoCo slider will run on a PC - so Im going to buy a PC laptop.

My initial spec was to just get a hunk of junk to run the slider.. but then it seems that PCs are so cheap that I can probably get a PC for about $1000 that will eat my 2011 Imac.

I know nothing of PCs, but kind of trust Dell and figured 15in Inspiron or Alienware.

Seems like I need I7 and 6gb graphics card.. maybe some users can point me to some other specs I might want.

For example running an external 4k monitor would be cool and maybe an ability to record footage maybe?

I guess onboard HD monitor is good enough

I use resolve (paid for)

In the back of my mind is of course pro res support.

Should I go PC or is this a fools economy?

S
 
Gigabyte makes a good gaming laptop. There are many flavors of i7 processor, and many generations. For 4K you really want newer and more powerful, generation 6 at the oldest, quad core required, high performance required. Minimum would then be an i7-6700HQ and nVidia 10xx graphics chip. Moving up to real graphics cards will cost you an extra $1000usd. I have an older version of these:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Laptop/AERO-series

i7-6700HQ, nVidia 960m, 16GB of ram, 2.5k wide display, battery lasts for more than 6 hours doing low performance work (rated at 10 hours). I see the latest and greatest has generation 8 processors which would probably be worth having if the price fits.
 
Ya, a friend who edits a lot on the road, is on his third Asus... As in: he likes them, and upgrades every couple of years to get more performance.

A laptop aimed at gamers makes sense (related: Last fall I bought an Alienware Aurora R6 "gamer" desktop machine. It's working well with Premiere, Resolve, etc). Here's a recent roundup review:

The Best Gaming Laptops of 2018
Besides being way more portable than big desktop rigs, today's gaming laptops pack serious power. Here's what you need to know to find the right mobile game machine along with our top-rated reviews.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2020688,00.asp

Note that I wouldn't pay too much attention to their "head-to-head" comparisons because it looks like a lot of the machines are configured differently, so how do you compare? And... well anyway, the review looks like it'll help get you oriented to the world of Windows laptops that emphasize performance (and discrete GPU options) over say battery life and ultimate light weight (I mean, below a certain threshold).

Oh, one thing to looks for... IIRC, some laptop motherboards max out at 16GB RAM... It'd be nice, I think, to have more RAM...or at least be able to have more RAM...
 
With the Adobe applications using render to ram, more ram is more better. With Media Composer, you can through more RAM at the preview quality (Buffer to ram?) which can make a big difference in what you can play in real time. Our new editing workstations are coming with 32GB of ram because I needed more to allow the graphics to have what it wanted. This is with an nVidia K1200 card installed, wanted 10GB of system ram to through on top of that, but it gives 5 streams of XDCamEX at full green preview quality and 3 or 4 of the same streams at +10 preview quality.
 
I recently bought a Dell XPS 9560 from their 'outlet' store - top spec with i7 7700HQ CPU, GTX 1050 GPU (4gb) UHD screen, 1TB NVME drive, 32gb ram - granted it was a bit more than £1000 but it was a lot less than the RRP for a new one. They now have a new one out but you may still be able to pick these up. I can edit 400mbps GH5 codec in Resolve (studio) without needing proxies/render cache but Premier Pro is not so good and needs the timeline rendering before it will play without dropping frames. There are some mods to improve cooling and stop the CPU from throttling under load which also help but it's a pretty impressive laptop for not 'that' much money......
 
The XPS are supposed to be pretty good, but I have no experience with them. That's a gen 7 processor, should be pretty powerful. There is also an i9 in the newest generation, but expect the price to be much higher. If you really want to be spendy, there are a few laptops with Xeon processors in them, and maybe a couple with dual Xeon. These will not be cheap!
 
Well if you want a cheap laptop that will not just eat your 2011 imac for breakfast but will also run circles around a mid-range 2013 mac pro check out this Dell deal for a $923 6-core laptop with gtx 1060 6gb GPU and thunderbolt 3. Should be about 50-100% faster than the fastest current macbook pro which is 3x the cost (not to mention poor thermals and throttling on most macbooks). This one tempted me but I'm sticking with my $500 4-core gtx 1050ti dell from Black Friday (still an amazing deal).

https://slickdeals.net/f/11552727

BTW things to watch out for with PC laptops, read reviews, there are lots and some use pretty poor materials or really ugly LCD screens. I recommend looking them up on notebookcheck.net.
 
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thanks all. I got a dell inspiron 7000 gaming with the highest spec i could find for my budget - Im sure its not perfect but the price was good, have not delved into its post power yet :)
 
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