Another Laptop/Vegas Config Question

mbush wrote on 11/22/2014, 10:54 AM

My wife would like to give me a Surface Pro 3 for Christmas which is great, but for what I know at the present time, I much rather apply the money to a laptop which is something that I haven't considered till now. I found this computer,

http://www.toshiba.com/us/computers/laptops/qosmio/X70/X70-AST3G26

My questions are: Will Vegas 13 require me to have 2 hhd's on the laptop to do efficient editing and which drives are better for editing, a 5400 rpm hybrid hhd or a 7200 rpm standard hhd? And last, has anyone had any experiences with this brand, choice of components or similar configurations as listed in the link?

Many thanks in advance,
Marvin

Comments

ddm wrote on 11/22/2014, 3:56 PM

All in all, that's a pretty beefy laptop, more horsepower than a Surface Pro 3, really. Lots more I/O's as well. I had a top of the line Toshiba laptop before I got my Dell Studio XPS, it was great, the nice thing about Premium products is that they're premium, should be fine. As far as the two drive situation goes... not sure if it makes much difference, the internals probably outperform a fast USB 3 external, regardless of the speed. I didn't look at the price so I can't say how good a deal it is, you might do as well with some of the HP workstation laptops, which are excellent performers, but usually pretty pricey.

mbush wrote on 11/22/2014, 5:33 PM

ddm,
Do you run Vegas on your laptop and if so, are you using a single drive and what graphics are you using? I thought that I probably need to stay in the Nvidia family.

deusx wrote on 11/22/2014, 8:18 PM

You can do much better than that. That Toshiba looks pretty outdated ( last gen. cpu and gpu ).

One thing to consided is getting a 15.6" instead of a 17" like that. Resolution is the same, so you gain nothing by using a larger laptop, it's just heavier to carry around.
If your eyesight is not great that may be the only reason to get a 17" laptop instead of a 15.6" one ( you should check and see what it looks like ).

This is much better https://www.mythlogic.com/2013_Models/pollux1613ablack.php. and customizable too.

Actual laptop is Clevo, these guys, Sager, Eurocom and some others just customize them and add branding.
I think you get SSD and another spinning drive on board. You can choose which yourself.

I would wait a bit though. They stopped making 90% ntsc color gamut screens in HD resolution, but in a couple of weeks they should roll out 4K screens with high gamut. I don't care about 4K res. itself, especially on a 15.6" screen, you have to halve the resolution anyway, but things do look better with high gamut screens and I guess should look a little sharper too on a 4K screen resized to HD res.

Right now I think only Asus NX500 comes with one of those screens.

mbush wrote on 11/22/2014, 9:12 PM

Thanks deusx for the information, I'll look into this. There is so much to consider and so much that they don't tell you in the ads.

OldSmoke wrote on 11/23/2014, 10:44 AM

Try and find one with an AMD R9 290/290X mobile GPU. AMD at the moment has the lead with these cards when comes to GPU acceleration. Note" MC AVC's OpenCL is broken for the R9 200 series but you always use CPU rendering for that.

mbush wrote on 11/23/2014, 7:19 PM

Thanks OldSmoke, I need that type of information. Do you any input as to whether or not two hard drives are needed on a laptop for vegas pro to work correctly.

OldSmoke wrote on 11/23/2014, 7:32 PM

2 drives are always better and already a compromise; I have 3 on my PC, one for system, one for files and one for rendering. You can use an USB drive for rendering but don't use it for your project files. You could also render to an SD card, most laptops have a separate slot for it.

Geoff_Wood wrote on 11/23/2014, 9:38 PM

Most laptops only have space for 1 HDD. However there are new combo SSDHDD drives that combine both into one unit, ideal for OS/Apps on the SSD and data on the HDD.

Saves wear-and-tear on the SSD side, as they do have a limited number of 'writes' to each location .

geoff

ddm wrote on 11/24/2014, 10:48 AM

>>>Do you run Vegas on your laptop and if so, are you using a single drive and what graphics are you using? I thought that I probably need to stay in the Nvidia family

I do run Vegas on my laptop, when I have to. I have a fairly beefy laptop that has an esata port that I can hook up my raid hard drive to, which is my fastest external storage device, and still it is somewhat painful to do much work on when compared to working on my desktop, even my old desktop. And that's just the nature of the beast, I'm afraid. The situation might be different with those HP workstation laptops, I guess, I've never had that experience. My Dell laptop has AMD GPU, which Vegas does recognize, but it's an older chipset and the performance is weak. I think the biggest factor is what you're used to, I edit on my desktop, mainly, and I'm used to that kind of performance, when I start using my laptop... everything just feels so slow and sluggish. I still do a lot of work on my laptop, which is quite convenient at times, it's just never something I look forward to. I think that more than speed (or lack of) is the limited screen space of just one 1920 by 1080 display, if I used a second monitor with my laptop that would improve the experience quite a bit, but kind of defeats the "portability" aspect of a laptop.