Laptop buying advise needed

Billy Cao · November 17, 2019

Hi all,

I'm looking to buy a laptop that I will be using for mostly 4K video editing, the most I will do is color grading and very light After Effects, and I wont touch RAW video, frenquent photo editing in Lightroom, and very light games (league of legends). Besides those, I also watch 4KHDR blue ray rips that are 50GB+ per file. Due to some reason, I have to use the laptop as a blue ray player and have it HDMI connected to a 4K OLED TV. On my old laptop, it can play back such videos with a bit of lag, but once connected to the TV, it became so laggy that its unplayable. Thus I would also like to ensure that the specs im looking at is sufficient for it.

I'm upgrading from a HP Pavilion 15 with 6700HQ and GTX 960M.

I have a budget of 1500SGD, and I can buy from reputatable retailers from China which are typically 200-400SGD cheaper than local market, therefore feel free to recommand me models that are slightly above my budget as I may be able to get it below 1500SGD in china.

Currently, I have locked on a few models.

Lenovo Leigon Y7000: i7-9750H, GTX 1650 4GB, 2x8GB 2666 RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD at 1548SGD

Dell G3 3590: i7-9750H, GTX 1650 4GB, 2x8GB 2666 RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD 1465SGD

HP Omen 15: i7-9750H, GTX 1650 4GB, 2x8GB 2666 RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD + 1TB 5400rpm HDD 1485SGD

My max weight perference is 2.3KG. No perference of brands but I do plan to use it for at least 3 years so I need a durable laptop. I live in Singapore so major brands should have their service centers here.

From what I researched, the Dell G3 series has very bad cooling, and the Lenovo Y7000 has the best cooling, and HP Omen sits close to Lenovo. Anyone who has experience with these models that can kindly confirm this for me?

A small question: is 5400rpm hard drive much slower than 7200rpm? I cant find any laptop within my specs and budget that runs on a 7200rpm HDD. I currently have a 7200rpm and after 3+ years of usage, it is very very slow. According to UserBenchmark, my HDD is at the last 7% of all the same models...

Also, is it worth for my use case to buy a GTX 1060 and a i7 8750H instead? I can get the Acer Aspire Nitro with 8750H and GTX 1060, 16GB RAM and 512G SSD+1TB HDD for 1465SGD. I read that the NVENC chip in GTX 1650 is the same as GTX 1060, and it is not the upgraded turing chip, which I am not sure if it matters to me. I uses Adobe Premiere and export 4K videos using NVENC (through Voukoder) on my current laptop, which is blazing fast compared to intel's quick sync. However, is the generation gap in CPU worth it for the extra performance of GPU? Also, does the new turing NVENC chip matters a lot to my use case? It wouldn't be wayy out my budget to get an GTX 1660Ti, but given that the games I play can run smoothly on a 960M, I doubt the need to upgrade the GPU.

Also, anyone knows or heard when Intel will release a H-series grade 10th gen CPU, or is it worth to get an i7 u series CPU, namly 10710U for my use case? I have to get the new laptop by end of december this year so I doubt I could wait for 10th gen H-series. I saw benchmarks and there is definitely gap between this and the 9750H, however I'm interested in the usage of AI and DL Boost technology which from what I know, Lightroom actively uses it. How much performance gain can I get from these techs, and is it worth to compensate for the loss over 9750H?

Should I wait for GTX 1660 non-Ti on laptops, or is Nvidia not even gonna make it at all? To me 1660Ti is surely overkill for gaming, but Im really interested in that new Turing NVENC chip.

I'm sorry if I cramped too much questions into 1 thread, but most of them are sort of linked so I thought it would be better if I list out my current questions together. Thanks for reading!