Laptop spec for £700 budget?

Hi,

Im finding my old laptop which is knocking on a bit now (5 year old) is struggling with editing my drone videos and doing general processing of my DSLR pictures.
Ive not got a massive amount to spend … prolly £700 including a voucher for either Argos or Currys.
Ive been thinking that a gaming laptop is the way to go because in my head im thinking they are designed for high end graphics… is this the way to go ?

I was looking at …

Acer Nitro 5 15.6in i5 8GB 512GB RTX3050Ti

  • Intel Core i5 - 11400H processor.
  • Hex core processor.
  • 2.7GHz processor speed with a burst speed of 4.5GHz.
  • 8GB RAM DDR4.
  • 512GB SSD storage.
  • Windows 11 Home.

Display features:

  • 15.6 inch screen.
  • Full HD Display.
  • Resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels.
  • Refresh rate144Hz.
  • 170 degree viewing angle.

Graphics:

  • NVIDIA RTX 30 Series RTX 3050Ti graphics card GDDR6.
  • Shared graphics card.
  • Dedicated graphics card.

any advice appreciated
Cheers

Should have said… i have another 8GB of DDR4 to put in it and i use external SSD hard drives so a large internal SSD isnt so much of an issue

cheers

Which editing software are you using?

I don’t know if he still has it for sale - but the specs are brilliant.

https://greyarro.ws/t/the-great-big-non-drone-for-sale-thread/21396/36

I use
I subscribe to Adobe for PS & LR
and ive got Davinci resolve for video

You may initially think that, due to the i7 cpu. Although it’s a 2nd gen i7, released nearly a decade ago. As such, the newer i5 (11th gen) is 45% faster than that i7.

i7 (2013) vs i5 (2021)

Other factors to consider, modern codecs were only supported from gen 6 onwards (2015+), such as HEVC, H265, etc. Also, modern cpus are so much more efficient, which will save leccy - especially if used for long stints of editing and being under load.

@Urbansnooper - looks fine for media editing. As long as your upgrading it to 16GB of ram.

PCs use the OS disk for swap files, especially when under load. So the faster read/write the OS disk, the better. You can even increase the allocation it uses, which is kind of like virtual ram, increasing the speed of your PC/laptop further still. Also, opening large media suites on an SSD is loads faster, than a HDD.

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@clinkadink

I meant internal SSD size, i would always get internal SSD.
I use all SSD extermal drives anyway

Cheers

Hmmm - yeah.

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What are you using to connect them to the laptop?

Most laptops come with USB 3.1 Gen 1, which transfers at a max of 300-400 Mbps. I.e. lower than some SSDs read/write speeds. And when you connect multiple external SSDs, that drops considerably causing a bottleneck.

For external SSDs, it’s best to use the USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10Gbps but for multiple drives, the transfer rate will be limited to around 700-800 MB/s and that’s with the faster USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface.

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I have a nitro 7, very upgradable. It now has 500G NVME for windows 1TB NVME games drive … 120GB SATA SSD for Linux and 32GB of ram.

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Gaming computers are for producing moving 2D graphics on your screen from a virtual 3D landscape environment of multiple, rapidly moving, complexly interacting virtual objects. This is hard work.

But video processing is only working with previously generated successive 2D images. Somebody please correct me if I am mistaken, but I think this is a much lesser task.

However, for any task, more memory and faster processing chips will usually help (as long as the program is sufficiently up to date to know how to use all the hardware in the computer).

If you are talking about resizing and resequencing a few clips, a bit of zooming and positioning, simple colour correction and adding some music.

But there is functionality (in some editing software) that can totally cane CPU and GPU, and need significant RAM and (for some that use their power) GPU RAM.

Spec requirements start with the software minimum and then increase depending on what one does (Edit … and how fast you want it to process) - that’s further stretched with 4k upwards video.

2D? Well - one can extract 3D information and have text, or whatever, “planted” in a scene that moves like 3D. And that takes 3D rendering.

Decent noise reduction can be comparing 10 frames before/after - pixel by pixel. Even at 4k that’s a shit load of processing.

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Personally - for what I want to do sometimes - a suitable laptop is way over my (or most people’s) £££ limit. When I get this house sorted I’ll be getting something desktop specifically for Davinci Resolve and nothing else.
Top end CPU of the day, minimum 32GB RAM, and a top-notch GPU with minimum 8GB RAM. (chances are there isn’t a “top-notch” GPU with less. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:).

Some intense processing I was doing yesterday was taking 6 hours for 1000 frames.

Not really complaining about that - it didn’t need hand holding so I could do other things whilst the temp on CPU and GPU were maxing out. :laughing:
I just love playing with the really esoteric stuff in DR.

Although, there was a genuine need for what I was trying to do yesterday (perfect tracking/stabilisation of fast Spitfires doing an air display taken with a hand-held 600mm lens), and DR did a totally awesome job. But the end result was marred by the original footage. The wobbles created image blur that looked strange suddenly appearing between crisp clean sections when there was no apparent reason for it … it was THAT well stabilised.

My old laptop i5 took 1h30min to export a video after I edited it. I bought a HP Omen i7 gaming laptop and loaded the same project and exported it in 11m1s. So I would say a gaming machine is the way to go.
I use Shotcut for video editing, and Paint shop Pro for photos.

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At last!!!

Dave has finally seen the light and is going to buy Apple M2 silicon (and save a fortune in the process) :bowing_man:t2:

No fortunes saved. Just lots of expense saved. For my (considerable) needs can still do it for far less than changing camp. Done rather a lot of research on this.

Do tell :slight_smile:

When I build - I will do. Won’t be for at least a year so things change.

True, the M3 will be out by then.

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I live at the southern end of the only M3 I’m really interested in.

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