laptop for edting

JustThings · January 6, 2017

Hello! I want to buy a new laptop for video editing and i'm between these two laptops.

What do you think is better?

Lenovo IdeaPad 100-15IBD

CPU-Intel Core i5 5200U 2,2-2,7 GHz

RAM- 8GB 1600MHz

GPU- intel HD 5500 1696GB

SSD

HP ProBook 455 G4

CPU- AMD A9-9410 2,9-3,5 GHz

RAM-8GB 2133 MGz

GPU- AMD radeon R5

SSD

MexxDeZeeuw · January 6, 2017

Neither will be great for editing. Maybe consider building a desktop. If you need to choose between these two, get the lenovo. But they won't handle editing well.

Aereldor · January 6, 2017

If you already have a Windows editing program you intend to use, get the cheapest laptop with a quad-core Core i7 you can find.

If you haven't decided on a program to edit with, get the cheapest Mac laptop you can find that has 8GB of RAM or more. iMovie and Final Cut Pro are so well optimized that they can run on potatoes (Apple potatoes) and still offer better performance than Adobe Premiere running on a modestly powerful desktop due to their use of background rendering.

Here's the cheapest available laptop with a quad-core i7 and a 1080p display.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015PYZ0J6/?tag=pcpapi-20

For perspective, I edited and rendered a 10-minute project on my computer (Core i3 4160, 8GB RAM) and a 2016 iMac (an underclocked Core i5 5675C, I believe) It has a slightly better CPU, but my computer took over an hour to render the project. The iMac? 12 minutes. 12 minutes

No other programs are capable of this. If you want to edit and don't care too much about gaming, get a Mac. Look at Apple's refurbished store or buy a used laptop. Keep in mind that you can still game a little on a mac, as the Iris Pro 6200 graphics on most 2015-2016 models (besides the newest MacBook Pros and 12" MacBooks) are actually capable of turning decent framerates on lighter titles. I played Rocket League on that computer at medium-low settings at 1080p, 30FPS.

Installing Windows Via BootCamp is likely to double your framerates, and will give you access to the entire library of PC games, which you can tweak to run on your potato iGPU.