Laptop advice

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mod343

Member
Which one of these two laptops would you recommend for editing?

System 1: ASUS N61Jq-A1
Intel Core i7-720QM 1.60 GHz Quad Core Processor
500GB, 7200 RPM Hard Drive
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
16 inch Display
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
1 GB DDR3 ATI Radeon HD 5730 graphics card

System 2: Lenovo IdeaPad Y55
Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 2.13GHz Processor
500GB, 5400 RPM Hard Drive (will replace with 7200)
6GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
15.6 inch display
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
1 GB GDDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M graphics card

As you can see, system 1 has a quad core Intel i7, but only has 4GB RAM and an ATI graphics card. The other is only a Core2 Duo but has 6 GB RAM and an nVidia graphics card. So my question is: Is the i7 better even though the Core 2 Duo has higher clock speed? Also, is it worth getting a nVidia graphics card (CUDA technology) instead of the ATI? Any technical details would be appreciated. I will be editing in Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas. I will also work with AVCHD files.
 
Depends on what program you're running, and what codec you're editing. Premiere will take advantage of the nVidia card's CUDA processing, Vegas won't. So if you're editing AVCHD or h.264 material, the Lenovo will probably fly in Premiere and Vegas would be way sluggish. But on the Core i7, the situation would probably be reversed, Vegas would probably be much faster on that system.

For DV/DVCPRO-HD and HDV/XDCAM, the graphics card plays a much less significant role.
 
So just to clarify, The extra two cores in the i7 don't make up for the speed lost by not having a nVIDIA graphics card. Right now I am leaning towards the i7. If you can suggest something better, it needs to be within the $1150 range.
 
Again, it depends on the program you're running. Vegas ignores the graphics card entirely, so yes those extra two cores would have a massive impact in how fast Vegas runs (well, I presume; I'm still a lamer in dual-core land). Premiere, on the other hand, offloads the h.264 decoding to the graphics card, so having a hugely powerful graphics card would be far more helpful than having a couple more CPU cores for specific tasks.

The right solution, of course, is to get the i7 and put in a powerful CUDA-compatible graphics card...
 
Video editing isn't very graphic card intensive. everyone should know that.

Clock for clock, the i7 processors are much faster than anything else you can buy atm.
 
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