Dear guys,

I'd like to seek your advise on choosing a laptop that would be fast enough to edit smoothly in Vegas. So far, I run Vegas Pro on a 4-years old, QX6700 based workstation. It's still up to the task (in fact, version 10 is able to play even the 280 Mbps nanoFlash clips at full speed and best quality), but - CAE being my main profession - I need to reserve it computing power for my plastics flow simulation work.

So, my plan is to buy a notebook, and use that as my main work post (accessing the jobs done on the workstation through Remote Desktop). I have two good offers for:

1. Dell XPS 17" laptop with i7-740QM CPU, and a CUDA-capable, 445M GT nvidia card with as much as 3 GB local memory (!)

2. Dell Precision M4500 workstation, with the currently fastest i7-940XM extreme CPU, and the Quadro FX 1800M graphics (just 1GB video memory).

Both configurations have plenty of RAM and HDD space of course, but the thing is the Precision is 2.5 times more expensive than the XPS. I have no experience running Vegas Pro on a mobile machine, so I'd appreciate if anyone - actually using one of the above CPU's for Vegas Pro editing - advised me about their experience.

Is the i7-740QM fast enough, or do I need the i7-940XM for smooth editing?

Thanks in advance for your opinions

Piotr

PS I should have added that I realize the best choice - as far as the bang for the buck - would be to buy another workstation, which - even with the fastest i7-980X six-core CPU - could be cheaper than the Precision notebook. However, I need a laptop also for preparing presentations and analyses for my paying Moldflow customers...