What are the best laptop specs to handle Vegas Pro 18 smoothly,please?.I am currently using Boot Camp on a Mac Book Pro-RAM 8GB,INTEL(R)i7-5557U CPU @ 3.10 GHz.This is on Windows 10 Home.Editing in VP is a chore,with the system freezing & crashing when some VFX plugins are used i.e Denoise and very slow with Mocha etc.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Look in the specs for VPro 18 what you at least need.
You will need at least i7-8th generation processor (example i7-8700) or newer. RAM ram is 16 or 32, but it depends on what you produce, it will allow you to edit 4K files. Graphic card: great is NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti and RTXs with SUPER name in it. For smoother performance you will need SSD M2 nvme for system and VEGAS and SSD sata or greater.
For laptop, look at notebooks with 16GB ram+, 11th generation intel CPu and SSD M2 nvme :)
IMO Gaming Laptops provide good bang/buck performance because they have a dedicated GPU. I got a 17" Evoo from Walmart.com, of all places, and it's 6-core I7-9750H and Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU are a pretty good combo. Mine came with (2) M.2 slots and (1) SSD which provides separate drives for OS, source, and target video.... I use it to edit 4K MP4 & HEVC but I use my 9900K or 11700K workstations for larger intermediate files. It's performance is noticeably better than my old 6-core Xeons, but not as fast as my 9900K or 11700K desktop systems.
Currently Walmart has the Evoo 15.6" with Ryzen 7 4800 for $899 USD, but because it is only 15.6", I don't think it has (3) drive bays onboard...
EVOO Gaming 15.6” Laptop, FHD, 120Hz, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, THX Spatial Audio, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM, RGB Backlit Keyboard, HD Camera, Windows 10 Home, Black - Walmart.com - Walmart.com
Specs:
great is NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
The GPUs of those older 10xx cards are barely leveraged by Vegas, and many users end up turning them off or switching; a Turing (1660 or better) is widely suggested for video production, software notwithstanding.
The biggest consideration, of course, is the display. Along with a killer CPU, get the biggest, highest quality screen you can afford; you will spend a lot of time staring at it.
@VPRO The main things to look for are the RAM, the CPU, and the Graphics card. Personally I wouldn't go with less than 32gb RAM because I do allot of 4K video. If you only do HD, 16 gb is probably fine. For the CPU, recent Intels have an igpu that can speed up decoding (except recent U-versions). The older Intel igpus (eg, hd630) are great decoders but not so much as a main gpu... jury's still out on the newer Iris igpu for general purpose editing. Some Ryzen G-series cpus also provide an embedded igpu, but they're not that common. Allot of folks give up on configuring an igpu and turn them off so a Ryzen with no igpu is more cost effective for them. The main graphics card is probably the most important for smooth playback, particularly if you have no igpu to help out. The 1650 and 1660s aren't bad but the 2060s are better. Ryzen laptops with a Vega 10 probably come close to the performance of a 2060. Biggest issue with the 2060s is probably battery life because they really suck down the juice. Here are a couple of laptops that seem to have it all (mostly) with a 10th gen Intel cpu (with Iris igpu), a 2060 for main graphics, and 32gb ram:
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Legion-i7-10750H-Processor-Graphics/dp/B08Z8H26VY
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-ROG-Strix-G15-i7-10870H/dp/B08X1K3VDF
Intel 11th gen laptops are just coming out now and their Iris graphics have double the silicon of their 10th gen... but I haven't seen one with more than their igpu for graphics and am waiting to hear from any Vegas users who's taken the chance and can report on how well Iris works all by itself for editing. Here's an example of one of them:
https://www.amazon.com/Flagship-Dell-5502-Quad-Core-i7-1165G7/dp/B08XNZNLVG
great is NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
The GPUs of those older 10xx cards are barely leveraged by Vegas, and many users end up turning them off or switching; a Turing (1660 or better) is widely suggested for video production, software notwithstanding.
The biggest consideration, of course, is the display. Along with a killer CPU, get the biggest, highest quality screen you can afford; you will spend a lot of time staring at it.
Got a laptop with a 1050ti in it and it's been working smoothly for me on the road. Just benched it against my bigger machines here.
Denoise in Vegas is going to be slow no matter what system you have. I moved to Neat Video myself.
Before buying the laptop see if it has reports of "thermal throttling." Ones with thin bodies may be able to give high performance for short bursts of time but will overheat and radically ramp down their performance under prolonged loads (like video editing).
My Dell XPS 15 has decent enough specs but even with undervolting and a bit of hardware mods (thermal pads) the voltage regulator modules get hot and the processor goes from 3GHZ+ to 800MHz until it cools again. I used Throttlestop to set a profile for prolonged usage that reduces voltage, disables turbo and limits how fast the CPU goes which mostly avoids throttling. Cooling the room also helps.
Thank you all for your great responses. While searching,guided by your great help,I bumped into this(link below).It is a GIBABYTE AERO machine. Again your views would be of great help. Thanks again.
@VPRO https://www.ultrabookreview.com/20056-core-i9-portable-laptops/
What a detailed review.Thanks a lot.
Your welcome.
I have a razer blade 15 advanced. It works almost flawless with Vegas, and a thousand times more stable with Vegas pro 18 than previous versions.
I also recently (last month) tested out the Microsoft surface laptop (most expensive config). It just didn't have the power.
Thank you all for your great responses. While searching,guided by your great help,I bumped into this(link below).It is a GIBABYTE AERO machine. Again your views would be of great help. Thanks again.
Wow, kind of like buying a 3080 (if you can land one) and getting the laptop for free. I see the same laptop is in stock in the US at Newegg. The mobile 3080 seems to get respectable benches:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-Mobile-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.497450.0.html
@VPRO New XMG laptops announced ... https://www.notebookcheck.net/XMG-announces-Neo-15-17-gaming-laptops-with-Intel-Tiger-Lake-H45-processors.539931.0.html
great is NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
The GPUs of those older 10xx cards are barely leveraged by Vegas, and many users end up turning them off or switching; a Turing (1660 or better) is widely suggested for video production, software notwithstanding.
The biggest consideration, of course, is the display. Along with a killer CPU, get the biggest, highest quality screen you can afford; you will spend a lot of time staring at it.
A 1080 Ti is quite a bit better than a 1660, and they are utilized as much as a 1080Ti.
VEGAS simply doesn't level GPU much, so going big on the GPU is a waste of dollars. You're better of upgrading your CPU, instead.
GPU is most important for Decode and Encode of compressed formats, but any Pascal card with NVENC is likely to perform well enough for almost everyone... Even a 1050.
Editor_101 wrote on 5/21/2021, 8:38 PM
A 1080 Ti is quite a bit better than a 1660, and they are utilized as much as a 1080Ti.
VEGAS simply doesn't level GPU much, so going big on the GPU is a waste of dollars. You're better of upgrading your CPU, instead.
GPU is most important for Decode and Encode of compressed formats, but any Pascal card with NVENC is likely to perform well enough for almost everyone... Even a 1050.
Depends on how you use the 1660. The 1080ti is faster for gaming. But in Vegas the 1660 does faster decoding of more complex camera formats on the timeline, like hevc, so will play smoother and render faster than a 1080. They run about even with easier to decode formats like avc. For formats the 1080 cannot decode, like hevc 444, the 1660 should run way faster.
Btw, I got dramatically better performance with my older i7-980 upgrading to a high performance gpu and moderately higher performance throwing a 1660 for decoding as a 2nd gpu into my Xeon system that already had a high performance gpu. This allowed my slower xeon-cpu system to compete on-par with my faster 9900k cpu system. If prices on the 1660 hadn't skyrocketed as of late, I'd have throw one of those into my 980 cpu system too.
I was tempted earlier this week (but not quite committed yet as Covid in the UK is still locking down my industry) by this Dell G15 Gaming Laptop which offered an extra 14% discount for 3 days.
i7 10870H up to 5GHz 8 cores, RTX3060 6GB GDDR6 (not the Ti version), 16GB RAM 2933MHz & upgradable e.g. with Crucial, 1TB NVMe SSD, USB 3.2 etc
Looked too good to be true. Far cheaper than the Alien monsters. Thoughts (4K editing via Canon dSLRs without proxies desirable but not essential) ?
Good to know all this info. I keep thinking of updating as VP17 crashes a bit - my 3rd gen i7 just barely cuts the mustard, but now I see that my computer just won't be able to handle VP18 at all.
@Peter-Riding The critical issue with laptops these day is their ability to handle heat. The best review I've seen on any computer about this is actually on the G15- watch it 
.
You can probably edit 4K Canon files without proxies, though 10-bit and 4:2:2 may not be possible without them (and not all the Canon formats even load in Vegas at this time).