Reuse or Replace

[The_Moose_is_Loose]

Budget (including currency): Sub $1000

Country: US of A

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Davinci Resolve. Photo editing and 4k video editing

Other details

Good afternoon,

I am having some trouble figuring out the most cost effective direction. I recently bought a laptop for night college courses and general computer stuff and got the bottom of the line one of these...

AMD Athlon™ Gold 3150U (2.4 GHz, up to 3.3 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache, 2 cores) + AMD Radeon™ Graphics

8GB DDR4-2400 SDRAM

 

Anyway, shortly after buying it, I got into drones. Then I really got into drones. Now I'm giving a drone business a go. 

 

Problem is this thing is lacking in the video editing horsepower. It will manage 1080 ok but really gets into trouble on 4k. I upped the ram to 16gb and while that helped, it's still a matter of making an edit, heading to the kitchen or the tv and waiting for it to apply the color or whatever it was you did.

 

Since having sunk most of my money into drones and startup costs, what direction should I go here?

1) Upgrade this thing or is there some drivers or anything that would give me any sort of chance?

2) I have a family member willing to give me what I paid for it so they can have a new laptop. I could either build a desktop but then have to factor in a monitor, or buy a better laptop.

3) Is it reasonable to buy a refurb off Amazon with the monitor, keyboard, mouse setup and then just max out the ram and add a GPU? I liked Linus' cheap gaming rig he did with the Optiplex. Do the same principals apply for cheap editing?

4) ? Any other ideas?

 

I used to be into building desktops and don't think I'd have a problem but the last one I put together was when the "new" Windows XP was released. It's been cheap laptops ever since.

 

Thanks everyone!

James

 

 

 

[Jumballi]

2) is the most sound option, but I would go with see if it can work until t absolutely doesn't work anymore

[Kilrah]

There's unfortunately nothing you'll be able to do to improve this thing, take advantage of the family member's offer.

 

But a decent machine for that purpose will obviously cost quite a bit more...

[_Omega_]

Go new... or used... so the lowest i would go is many programs will only work "fine" (more like okay) with 4k if you have 8GB of VRAM an RX580 and maybe a first gen Ryzen if you can get it for cheap...

[Rybo]

Hybrid option: Get an SSD and try to put it in there.  I'm betting the HDD in there is hurting your performance.  A lot.  

If that doesn't do it for you, put the HDD back in, take advantage of your family member's kind option, and use the SSD in the rig you build.