Laptop buying advice for Vegas 11 Platinum

Bluesmanuk wrote on 11/6/2011, 11:55 AM
I am in a quandry.

I'm looking to update my ageing Acer 5920G and have two choices.

One has a Intel Core i7 2630QM but with Intel HD3000 graphics card for £499

The other has a Intel Core i5-2410M and Nvidia GT 540M 1Gb graphics for £450

I'm not interested in gaming, so from that perspective, the graphics card is not an issue.

From a purely video editing point of view though, will be Combination or Core i7 and integrated Intel graphics be a better bet than the i5 and dedicated graphics?

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/6/2011, 2:25 PM
It sounds like the hardware is more than adequate to turn the program, Blues.

Just make sure you've got a big monitor with lots of resolution -- or add an additional when you're editing. The interface demands a lot of real estate!
Birk Binnard wrote on 11/6/2011, 5:21 PM
Your 2 choices pose an interesting dilemma - the i7 will process 8 simultaneous instruction streams but its Intel graphics will not allow Vegas to use GPU acceleration. On the other hand, the i5 can process only 6 (or is it 4?) instruction streams at a time, but since it comes with nVidia graphics Vegas will be able to use the GPU.

From what I can tell (my system is an i7 with nVidia GPU) the GPU capability reduces AVCHD render times by about 25%, so it is def. noticeable. However, rendering likes to use all the CPU resources it can get, so more is always better.

Perhaps a bigger performance bottleneck for you will be the fact that you will have only one disk drive available. In general it's best to have 2 - one for input media and one for rendered output. Some newer laptops incorporate an SSD boot drive (for Windows & your applications) and a HDD for data/everything else. A system like this might be a better performer if you plan on doing lots of Vegas rendering.

Regardless of what choice you make be sure to check out the "64 bit fix" for VMS. It is easy to do and makes a big difference with overall stability.