Scott Posted December 29, 2011 Share Posted December 29, 2011 Looking for a workhorse to do some video editing. The current spec I have really lags and stutters so need something quite hefty to fit the bill. My budget is £650, the best I could find so far is the following.... https://www.simplyacer.com/Acer_Aspire_5755G_1114405.html I found it for £650 elsewhere but it's now sold out. Being the resourceful bunch that you all are I thought I would put it to you guys to see if you could come up with anything as I'm really struggling to find good value power for money. I currently have the Aspire 6930G which has 4GB DDR2 Ram and a P7450 Core2Duo Processor. It's by no means a slouch but it's a bit older now and just can't cope with what I'm looking to do. I'm looking for an animal of a processor to take everything I can throw at it, dedicated GFX would be a bonus but nothing else is important. Thanks folks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abz Posted December 30, 2011 Share Posted December 30, 2011 If it is possible to up the budget then you could get an i7 processor laptop which you will notice quite a difference from your current laptop, which to be honest is quite a decent spec in itself. The budget you have should be able to get you a fairly decent i5 processor laptop, if it is video editing you want then the main thing is to ensure it has a good spec graphics card (which I am sure you know anyway). http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/what-s-the-best-core-i5-laptop--720912 Out of them laptop's I'd go with the Dell one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted December 30, 2011 Author Share Posted December 30, 2011 Cheers, the one I linked is an i7. Going by the benchmark scores I doubt I'll need much more for what I'm after but I don't want to drop down much lower if possible Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abz Posted December 30, 2011 Share Posted December 30, 2011 Cheers, the one I linked is an i7. Going by the benchmark scores I doubt I'll need much more for what I'm after but I don't want to drop down much lower if possible Sorry, totally missed the link, I read the Aspire & thought you were referring to that. Doubt you could get much better value for money than that. The Acer laptops are pretty good, quad core & 6GB ram is plenty of power & looks like a decent Graphics Card too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted December 30, 2011 Author Share Posted December 30, 2011 Yeah that's what I'm thinking. I've always bought Acer due to the value for money, the spec for your £ is generally a good bit higher than other brands. The only issue I've had with my Acers over the years is the power packs, I don't think I've had one last longer than a year yet. Small price to pay though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigbloodyturbo Posted December 30, 2011 Share Posted December 30, 2011 sorry to semi-jack your thread scott but maybe you would know. I just bought my other half a laptop for xmas as she does software engineering in uni. She uses fireworks and something called CS5 or whatever. I bought her a machine with an I5 and only 3gig or ram with the idea of upgrading the ram as soon as xmas was over. The laptop has since had a screen fault and will be going back as soon as im onshore, should I upgrade this to an i7? do you reckon its worth it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted December 30, 2011 Author Share Posted December 30, 2011 I might be wrong but I don't think it would depend on the type of software engineering she is doing. For the most part I don't think a huge amount of processing power is required but for the more power hungry apps being designed etc I would say it would definitely be worthwhile. It would all depend on the cost of the upgrade really. Remember that the sandy i5 is a monster as far as laptop performance goes. I'm just going for the i7 because it's falling into the price bracket. There is a huge difference between the i5 I was looking at and the i7 I have chosen. In the benchmark tests I think it was twice as powerfull as the i5 and 3 times more powerful than what I currently have. The performance of the i7 honestly has me drooling (geek I know) and it will blow my current desktop PC out of the water. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny g Posted December 30, 2011 Share Posted December 30, 2011 I got Ana an i7 Dell Q15R for Christmas. I think it was £550. Seems a pretty nice laptop to be fair. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigbloodyturbo Posted December 30, 2011 Share Posted December 30, 2011 Thanks for the response, I think you may be right, she put Fireworks and a load of other stuff she uses on it and she mailed me and said it was suffering but I think it may be more due to the small amount of memory. Think th ei5 will do her for now, thanks min. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caseys Posted December 30, 2011 Share Posted December 30, 2011 Have you actually checked if it's the GPU/CPU being the bottleneck Scott? Just asking as maybe worth checking you're not i/o bound - or if what you're doing is single-threaded (so then you're better off with highest clock speed rather than higher core count). But if it's GPU bound I'd agree the onboard with most core2duo boards was naff. Intel 3xxx series iirc. If you're i/o bound on a naff 4200/5400rpm laptop HDD you'd be better off spending 1/3 of your budget on an SSD. Edit : Just noted you're doing video editing. As said, check if your application is multhreaded. Hardly *any* video editing applications apart from pro ones take use of cuda or openGL easily and so get the CPU to perform better. As an example my 8-core MP @ 3.0Ghz does better than the later generation Xeons with double the threads, but at a far lower clock speed. Video editing is CPU and IO intensive if it can get the throughput, memory will only be a trouble if you're rendering and most likely a 64-bit app to be able to go over the 4Gb address limit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted December 30, 2011 Author Share Posted December 30, 2011 I got Ana an i7 Dell Q15R for Christmas. I think it was £550. Seems a pretty nice laptop to be fair. I've ordered mine now but I had a look at the Q15R out of curiosity and it's a great buy. I thought I had exhausted all the i7 options too. Some good deals going around Thanks for the response, I think you may be right, she put Fireworks and a load of other stuff she uses on it and she mailed me and said it was suffering but I think it may be more due to the small amount of memory. Think th ei5 will do her for now, thanks min. It's funny that 3gb is now a small amount of RAM. I remember being at the cutting edge of the home PC brigade with my 64mb of DDR Ram and 16mb Voodoo 3DFX GFX card Have you actually checked if it's the GPU/CPU being the bottleneck Scott? Just asking as maybe worth checking you're not i/o bound - or if what you're doing is single-threaded (so then you're better off with highest clock speed rather than higher core count). But if it's GPU bound I'd agree the onboard with most core2duo boards was naff. Intel 3xxx series iirc. If you're i/o bound on a naff 4200/5400rpm laptop HDD you'd be better off spending 1/3 of your budget on an SSD. Edit : Just noted you're doing video editing. As said, check if your application is multhreaded. Hardly *any* video editing applications apart from pro ones take use of cuda or openGL easily and so get the CPU to perform better. As an example my 8-core MP @ 3.0Ghz does better than the later generation Xeons with double the threads, but at a far lower clock speed. Video editing is CPU and IO intensive if it can get the throughput, memory will only be a trouble if you're rendering and most likely a 64-bit app to be able to go over the 4Gb address limit. I'm using Sony Vegas 9.0c Pro 64bit. It felt like it was the processor and the ram holding me back but I didn't look into it properly, the processor being a 2.0ghz Core2Duo and the ram being 4gb DDR2. The clock speed of the Ram is 667 which I'm pretty sure is where my main issues are coming from. I'm hoping that even though it's a 4 core processor I've ordered that the single clock speed along with the ram frequency will have me covered. I'm more buying the lappy to get myself something new to play around with for a bit, to cheer myself up, but thought if I was doing that I wold be better to do it properly and get the best I could afford. Video editing is the main driver for the performance, other than that I mostly use it as any other user would An SSD will definitely be on my shopping list in the near future. The trouble is that I like a lot of space on my laptop and the new one doesn't have a 2nd bay unfortunately. I'll need to save up my pennies to get a reasonable sized SSD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted January 1, 2012 Author Share Posted January 1, 2012 Laptop came today and it's fantastic. Runs the video editing software with ease, all the effects are flawless and the previews all work fantastic even with full HD. Its only drawback is that my other laptop has space for a 2nd harddrive, I've split the partition in this one but I would prefer a physical secondary. Not to worry though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abz Posted January 1, 2012 Share Posted January 1, 2012 Laptop came today and it's fantastic. Runs the video editing software with ease, all the effects are flawless and the previews all work fantastic even with full HD. Its only drawback is that my other laptop has space for a 2nd harddrive, I've split the partition in this one but I would prefer a physical secondary. Not to worry though That was a rapid delivery! 750GB internally must be nice though, how times have changed External 1TB drive for backups? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted January 1, 2012 Author Share Posted January 1, 2012 That was a rapid delivery! 750GB internally must be nice though, how times have changed External 1TB drive for backups? Yeah, Amazon Prime next day delivery (trial) so worked out well I've got a few external drives but I get lazy when it comes to backing up. I'll need to get the finger out though with regards to the wee ones videos & pics etc. Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abz Posted January 1, 2012 Share Posted January 1, 2012 Yeah, Amazon Prime next day delivery (trial) so worked out well I've got a few external drives but I get lazy when it comes to backing up. I'll need to get the finger out though with regards to the wee ones videos & pics etc. Cheers Backups are important, most don't know that till they need it. Grab the pictures & burn them to DVD, then backup again to an external drive. A lot of software avavlible so backups are just a simple one click Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheefa Posted January 2, 2012 Share Posted January 2, 2012 Scott, I took delivery of a new Dell XPS 17 i7 laptop only a week ago for £717 and it's absolutely mint. Packed with features, 6gb ram, 1tb HDD and a 3gb dedicated graphics card and an all round entertainment machine. I have owned various Asus, Acer and Samsung models over the years and this is the first Dell - very pleased. Worth a look....? Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheefa Posted January 2, 2012 Share Posted January 2, 2012 I'm too late............as always! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted January 2, 2012 Author Share Posted January 2, 2012 Scott, I took delivery of a new Dell XPS 17 i7 laptop only a week ago for £717 and it's absolutely mint. Packed with features, 6gb ram, 1tb HDD and a 3gb dedicated graphics card and an all round entertainment machine. I have owned various Asus, Acer and Samsung models over the years and this is the first Dell - very pleased. Worth a look....? Greg Sounds like a good buy too, where did you get it from? 17" was going to be too big for me anyway. I've had a 17" laptop before and it was just a touch too big for the way I use it 3GB Gfx sounds interesting though, 1gb is plenty for what I do Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheefa Posted January 2, 2012 Share Posted January 2, 2012 Sounds like a good buy too, where did you get it from? 17" was going to be too big for me anyway. I've had a 17" laptop before and it was just a touch too big for the way I use it 3GB Gfx sounds interesting though, 1gb is plenty for what I do Well at least you are sorted now mate. Got min Direct from Dell. They had a free HDD and RAM upgrade deal on which expired end of December. Always other deals on. It's a beast don't get me wrong and quite heavy but perfect for entertainment etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted January 2, 2012 Author Share Posted January 2, 2012 Well at least you are sorted now mate. Got min Direct from Dell. They had a free HDD and RAM upgrade deal on which expired end of December. Always other deals on. It's a beast don't get me wrong and quite heavy but perfect for entertainment etc. Yeah the 17" screen makes a massive difference to most kinds of entertainment. I really loved that about my old one. You did well getting that when you did, having a look now the cheapest i7 XPS 17 they have is around £900 lol. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheefa Posted January 2, 2012 Share Posted January 2, 2012 I was lucky then Scott! They are lovely machines and the I7 CPU is blinding!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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