Video Editing Laptop Specs [help?]

[wary nighttide]

So I was wondering if any tech savvy Gaians could help me decide on some specs for a new laptop. I'm looking to mainly use it to edit videos and will be using Sony Vegas and working with around 50+ hours of footage for one project I have planned (*cough* Game of Thrones music video *cough*). I have a budget of 1.5k US$.

Specs I'm tentatively working around:
Brand: Acer
Series: Aspire V15 Nitro Black Edition
CPU: Intel Core i7-4720HQ 2.6 GHz
Memory: 16GB DDR3
Storage: 1 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 860M
Video Memory: 4 GB GDDR5
Number of Cores: Quad-core Processor

How do these sound? I suppose the thing I'm most concerned with is the memory and storage.

Thank you in advance to any and all that reply,
Edvie emotion_bigheart

[bhnascar]

Seems pretty good to me. From your use case I would be keeping an eye out for a CPU with lots of cores, a strong supporting GPU, and lots of disk space, and you seem to have those covered. I'm not sure how many GB 50+ hours of video translates too (this could depend on whether or not you're doing 4K content, for example), but I suppose you can always tack on an external hard drive or bump up the HDD to 2TB if you find that you need more space.

TDIL: There aren't any mobile i7's with 8 physical cores??

[wary nighttide]

bhnascar

Seems pretty good to me. From your use case I would be keeping an eye out for a CPU with lots of cores, a strong supporting GPU, and lots of disk space, and you seem to have those covered. I'm not sure how many GB 50+ hours of video translates too (this could depend on whether or not you're doing 4K content, for example), but I suppose you can always tack on an external hard drive or bump up the HDD to 2TB if you find that you need more space.

TDIL: There aren't any mobile i7's with 8 physical cores??

Do you think that 2TB HDD would be worth sacrificing the SSD?
& When it comes to GPU, the more GB dedicated memory is better, yes?

Also, it doesn't appear that Acer has any i7s with 8 cores - I don't think I've seen that on any of the brands I've looked at (ASUS, I did a little looking at MSI..)

Thank you for your help 3nodding It's good to know that I'm on the right track after waiting for so long to make this kind of investment.

[bhnascar]

Edvie

Do you think that 2TB HDD would be worth sacrificing the SSD?

No, I would definitely keep the SSD. In my opinion, a hybrid is still much better than going all HDD - Windows startup time will be much faster, applications installed to the SSD will be way snappier.

Edvie

& When it comes to GPU, the more GB dedicated memory is better, yes?

Well, more dedicated will always be better than less dedicated memory, but what you should really look out for with GPUs is bandwidth, which is the speed at which GPU can access its memory. For instance, GDDR5 RAM has twice the memory bandwidth of GDDR3, so 1GB of GDDR5 would be much better than 4GB of GDDR3. (The times when you do want to worry about the amount of RAM is when you're hooking up your computer to say, 2 or 3 high resolution monitors. In this case, having more RAM will help the computer keep up with generating output for the displays.)

Edvie

Also, it doesn't appear that Acer has any i7s with 8 cores - I don't think I've seen that on any of the brands I've looked at (ASUS, I did a little looking at MSI..)

Actually all i3/i5/i7 processors are manufactured by Intel, and PC makers like ASUS, Acer, and MSI just take those chips and put them into their laptops and desktops. Here's the full list of 4th generation i7s with specs.

Also, glad to help. smile Might want to wait for input from other people, too, in case I got anything wrong....