Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

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fatjin

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Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 4:43 pm

Hi

I'm a amateur video editor and I'd like to get a brand new workstation labtop
that has possibly "zero problems" running DR15 as smooth as baby's ass.

I currently have XPS 9560 but it lags like a bitch,
not only playbacks but the entire experience is just way 2 slow and painful.

Any suggestions?

Let's say my budget is around 5,000 USD - 6,000 USD

I'm thinking of Lenovo P1 (fully decked)
but not quite sure if this will be sufficient or powerful enough
to run DR15 without any hick-ups....

PLS let me know your opinions.
Thanks a million !!!
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 6:02 pm

Does it have to be laptop?
For this money you can have great desktop. Resolve can work on laptops fairly well, but it will be never the same as on desktop for 5K.

You want a laptop with as good GPU as possible - rather Nvidia. It also depends if you want to work with HD, UHD, compressed files like h264. Anything like GTX 1060 6GB VRAM and up.
P2000 4GB in P1 is not very good for Resolve. Avoid Quadro as the one which work well in Resolve will cost small fortune.
You want laptops like:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Razer-Bla ... 631.0.html (this is "only" 2.6K$)
or other from this list:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Notebookc ... 628.0.html
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Carsten Sellberg

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 6:33 pm

Hi.

You can't do the same thing in Resolve on a 6 core mobile CPU as on a 16 core CPU in a Desktop.

But a understand that a laptop can be a solution for people on the road.

When Intel went from 4 core mobile CPU's up to 6 cores mobile CPU's did only very few laptop manufacturers improve the cooling in their laptops, even that the 6 core is more powerful and generate more heat. So don't choose a tiny laptop as the Dell XPS or Lenovo P1 as the poor cooling will get then to throttle. I normally recommend people to get a medium to large sized laptop, so they can get rid of the generated heat.

I also like to tell you that Intel have announced new mobile 8 core CPU in Q2 of this year. So depending on what you want to use it for, will I recommend a laptop with a 6-8 core Intel mobile CPU. And if you want to work with 4K material, will I recommend it, to have an Internal Graphics Card with 8 GB of vRam.

Regards Carsten.
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 8:23 pm

I've been having a pretty good experience so far with an Alienware m15, except for the Graphics Amplifier -- that is, sadly, rather a mediocre product in dire need of an update... or Alienware should just kill it off and replace the AGA port with another dedicated TB3 port.

Other than that, the machine's quite nice; it performs well, handles 4K like it's nothing, 8K decently, though compositing with multiple 8K clips is crash-prone without the eGPU (I have a Radeon VII for that).

It play braw well, so it will definitely do fine for me until I build a desktop/deskside workstation.

It is bigger than most premium laptops these days, but not huge... and I'm willing to take the size hit for the performance benefits.

I'm eyeing the HP ZBook line also though... they're generally better designed and more robust (no half-a$$ed AGA silliness), but tied to Quadros, so they have less display memory which was a bit of a downer for me. Plus the lead times were around a month...
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Greg_E

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 9:03 pm

You want a laptop that takes a real discreet graphics card, not some GPU soldered to the main board. I'd probably go for a Quadro card in the fastest flavor that I could afford. Dell and HP both make workstation replacements that can have these cards installed (and upgrade later which is important).

But as Carsten mentions, you could build a really nice desktop for that kind of money, something that really flies (big HP Z workstation with Xeon processors and piles of RAM).

HP Zbook Studio would be close, but it looks like the graphics are soldered in place (could be wrong).

The HP Zbook 17 G5 looks like a nice configurable machine with multiple processors to chose, up to 128GB of RAM in four slots, SATA, NVMe, dual thunderbolt3, USB3.1, UHD display, multiple graphics card choices, etc. https://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/ ... index.html Looks like a spread of $2000.00 usd to $4500.00 usd depending on configuration.

Dell should have something very similar as well.

I might be tempted to look at an older model, and upgrade the graphics card to see if I could save some money. Might even go with an external GPU for those times when I really couldn't get buy, again this might save money and could maybe be a rental item if not needed a lot of the time.
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 9:18 pm

Quadro is simply waste of money. Any decent one will cost a much as whole laptop itself.
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostThu Mar 21, 2019 9:23 pm

Greg_E wrote:You want a laptop that takes a real discreet graphics card, not some GPU soldered to the main board. I'd probably go for a Quadro card in the fastest flavor that I could afford. Dell and HP both make workstation replacements that can have these cards installed (and upgrade later which is important).


That's rare in laptops. Most of them build the GPU into the motherboard, and for the most part ones that allow for GPU upgrades use proprietary card form factors in order to keep them small enough to fit. You're not going to be putting just any GPU in a laptop, the thermal design is much too stringent.

The new Area 51 is a bit of a change of pace in that regard... but when looking at laptops, don't expect them to be modular.
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostFri Mar 22, 2019 4:50 am

Rakesh Malik wrote:
Greg_E wrote:The new Area 51 is a bit of a change of pace in that regard... but when looking at laptops, don't expect them to be modular.

Thanks for the tip! I think an Area 51 laptop with an i9 CPU and an internal RTX 2080 GPU could do a helluva job for Resolve... though it starts at around $5149. As with a lot of things, you get what you pay for.
marc wielage, csi • VP/color & workflow • chroma | hollywood
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostFri Mar 22, 2019 1:35 pm

Why are Quadro a waste? Aren't they tailored to what Resolve/Fusion are doing? Quadro is still the recommended family for other NLE (even if they don't really use GPU acceleration).

I see that Alienware has a Dell specific RTX graphics card (that can be changed/upgraded), I'll add that to my list of high end laptops. Might even be able to get a discount through my work so this might make sense for me.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 2:26 am

Someone said in this forum that Davinci works in 32bit graphic processing....and NVIDIA quadro cards work in 64 bits...thats why quadro cards are waste...


Well Im wondering if some of most decked out Dell Precision Workstation laptops or Lenovo P72 labtops have NVIDIA Quadros with much higher than 8giga VRAM....would these super high quadro cards still not function well for DR15???
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 10:34 am

fatjin wrote: thats why quadro cards are waste...


Hi.

QUOTE my own provius posting: ' The Quadro Cards have good fp64 performance and the GTX/RTX cards the have good fp32 performance. And Resolve do all its image processing in the GPU in fp32. '

So your conclution is rigth. That I think that ' quadro cards are waste... '

And then you wonder and then ask ' would these super high quadro cards still not function well for DR15??? '.

I newer wrote, that quadro cards do not function well for DR15. Actually I don't even know, how the fp64 calculation are designed to work in a quadro graphics card.


I also want to post a link to the above mention Alienware Area-51m (i9-9900K, RTX 2080) Laptop Review:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware ... 667.0.html

QUOTE from the 'Verdict' at the end of the review: ' but it hurts us to see 99+ C core temperatures when under full utilization.

While such high core temps are not inherently unsafe, we don't think there is an excuse for it. The Eurocom Sky X7C houses the same Core i9 CPU and yet it tops out at 84 c when subjected to the same stress test without needing to throttle clock rates. If Clevo can do it, then there's no reason why Dell shouldn't be able to, either.

The next disadvantage is something we weren't expecting. Contrast ratio is not as deep as on last year's Alienware 17 R5 or the MSI GT75 ...'

I don't like Clevo and all its siblings. And I will newer recommend the Intel Core i9-9900K for a desktop build. So if you need a 8 core CPU in your laptop will I suggest you to wait for the coming Intel 8 core mobile CPU, confirmed to come from Intel in Q2 of this year.

Regards Carsten.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 1:14 pm

Why are so many of these high end laptops only using 1920x1080 displays?

The Eurocom does look better from the little bit of looking that I did.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 1:20 pm

The current versions of Davinci Resolve makes use of fp32 calculations with the GPU.
It doesn't care what brand or make it is, as long as it can do fp32.
The more fp32 is can do and the more memory bandwidth you have the faster Davinci Resolve will be.
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Carsten Sellberg

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 2:10 pm

Greg_E wrote: The Eurocom does look better from the little bit of looking that I did.


Hi.

Clevo is a OEM laptop manufacturer with its Headquarter based in Taiwan. It both sell laptop with their own Brand and at the same time, it uses Resellers selling the same laptop with the Resellers own Brand. Eurocom is such a Reseller Brand.

A major problem with this setup is that updating to new BIOS'es is the responsibility of the Resellers. So if a Clevo laptop need a BIOS Fix, is it the responsibility of the individual Reseller. So expect BIOS Fixes only to come out to some of its Reseller Brands and not to others. Even if other Resellers sell exactly the same laptop, just under an another Brand.

Clevo laptops normally make more noise than other brands. Some time ago Notebookcheck admitted that the reason that some Clevo laptops got so high score on their reviews are, that when they way back set up the score table, did they never expect that any manufacturers will make so noisy laptops. But Clevo did.

Regards Carsten.
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 11:42 pm

Greg_E wrote:Why are so many of these high end laptops only using 1920x1080 displays?


I've wondered the same thing myself. I pretty much ignore even the Boxx and Velocity workstation because of their crappy monitors -- they're supposed to be PROFESSIONAL machines, yet they still have mediocre HD displays on them... not paying attention to their market, I suppose.
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSat Mar 23, 2019 11:46 pm

fatjin wrote:Someone said in this forum that Davinci works in 32bit graphic processing....and NVIDIA quadro cards work in 64 bits...thats why quadro cards are waste...


The Quadro line supports 64-bit math at full speed -- look at the Radeon VII comparisons sometime (same diff) -- the Radeon VII is artificially capped at 1/4 of its peak throughput when using 64-bit arithmetic so that it doesn't trash the sales of its far more expensive Instinct big brother.

Same deal with Quadro; it's not that Quadros don't support 32-bit math, they do; but if you don't need full-bore 64-bit math, then why spend the extra money on a Quadro?

That's why Quadros are for us a waste of money; you have to choose between less memory or more money to get the same performance as with a GTX or RTX card.

Well Im wondering if some of most decked out Dell Precision Workstation laptops or Lenovo P72 labtops have NVIDIA Quadros with much higher than 8giga VRAM....would these super high quadro cards still not function well for DR15???


They'll work quite well, but at a premium.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 12:24 am

The new Quadro RTX cards are actually pretty bad in FP64

Quadro RTX 8000
Memory bandwidth: 672 GByte/s
FP32 (float) performance: 16.31 TFLOPS
FP64 (double) performance: 0.5098 TFLOPS (1:32)

Radeon VII
Memory bandwidth: 1024 GByte/s
FP32 (float) performance: 13.44 TFLOPS
FP64 (double) performance: 3.360 TFLOPS (1:4)

Resolve does everything in FP32
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 12:28 am

MishaEngel wrote:The new Quadro RTX cards are actually pretty bad in FP64

Quadro RTX 8000
Memory bandwidth: 672 GByte/s
FP32 (float) performance: 16.31 TFLOPS
FP64 (double) performance: 0.5098 TFLOPS (1:32)

Radeon VII
Memory bandwidth: 1024 GByte/s
FP32 (float) performance: 13.44 TFLOPS
FP64 (double) performance: 3.360 TFLOPS (1:4)

Resolve does everything in FP32


Interesting -- not at all what I expected... I figured nVidia's top end Quadros would be FP64 monsters, but I guess nVidia's focusing on the ray tracing and tensor hardware instead these days.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 11:41 am

Greg_E wrote:Why are Quadro a waste? Aren't they tailored to what Resolve/Fusion are doing? Quadro is still the recommended family for other NLE (even if they don't really use GPU acceleration).



Not true at all. Quadros were never made with NLEs in mind at all. Use of GPUs in current video world is limited as they only work well for processes which can be split into 1000s of subprocesses. List of such an operations in video world is not that big at all.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 11:51 am

Andrew Kolakowski wrote: Use of GPUs in current video world is limited as they only work well for processes which can be split into 1000s of subprocesses. List of such an operations in video world is not that big at all.


Hence Davinci Resolve is doing almost everything in GPU...
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 1:12 pm

All what can be done on GPU and when data is already there (manipulation on pixels when they already in some uncompressed form). Whole importing/exporting is done on CPU.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 1:32 pm

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Whole importing/exporting is done on CPU.


Davinci Resolve can make use of GPU de/encoding with NVidia cards (AMD also has the hardware to do this).
RED is moving the decoding of .R3D from the CPU to the GPU.
Intopix https://www.intopix.com/ is also using the GPU for a lot work.

BRAW is a codec that is optimized for hybrid compute(CPU+GPU).
More code is converted from CPU to GPU these days.
Topaz A.I. Gigapixel is also a very good example of how software can benefit from GPU or hybrid processing. Blender 2.80 is a very good example of how to let software decide between using the CPU(low-latency) or GPU(parallel).

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 2:26 pm

Nvidia or AMD h264/5 encoding/decoding is done not on 'main' GPU but dedicated module inside GPU which is programmed only for this specific tasks. So I would argue that precisely it's not really GPU processing.

Which parts of BRAW can be done on GPU? Decoding or final debayering or both?

There are codecs written specially for GPU and best example is not BRAW, but Daniel2. Those codecs are mainly simple (intermediate) ones, not things like complex h264/5.

If something can be processed in parallel then GPU is good. If you have to move data between CPU and GPU a lot then this is slow and overall whole process starts to also be slow.
Point is that creation of Nvidia Quadro range wasn't driven by usage in NLEs. There were main way more important core areas for usage. Except 10bit OpenGl surface (and big VRAM) pro cards don't offer anything special for NLEs compared to consumer range, yet they cost small fortune.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 3:14 pm

I worded that poorly. When the applications are being developed (nle in the case), aren't they being developed with Quadro in mind? Avid still "requires" Quadro cards for fully supported systems, even though they barely use the GPU. They never suggest that a GTX card is better (or even good enough).
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 3:23 pm

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Except 10bit OpenGl surface (and big VRAM) pro cards don't offer anything special for NLEs compared to consumer range, yet they cost small fortune.


ECC-memory, ECC-GPU, certified drivers for SolidWorks, Creo, SiemensNX, AutoDesk, etc... For the user base of Quadro and Radeon Pro cards, the cards themselves are a small fraction of the cost (software cost are a lot higher and so are the cost when something might go wrong because of a bit flip, hence ECC).

Indie's and small companies are oftened better off with a prosumer/consumer card.
The Pixar's in the industry will always go for a Pro card with ECC and certified drivers.

It's simple economics.
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 3:30 pm

Greg_E wrote:I worded that poorly. When the applications are being developed (nle in the case), aren't they being developed with Quadro in mind?


They're developed with OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA, Metal... the toolkit, not the model. The high end CAD stuff runs better on Quadro and/or Radeon Pro than on the gamer cards because the workstation models have better OpenGL support -- better in that it's more carefully tested and validated. Hardware wise the differences aren't that much; usually the pro gear gets the same features and all, but later due to the more extensive validation involved.

Avid still "requires" Quadro cards for fully supported systems, even though they barely use the GPU. They never suggest that a GTX card is better (or even good enough).


Avid needs to get with the times, then. Sigh...
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Rakesh Malik

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 3:40 pm

MishaEngel wrote:ECC-memory, ECC-GPU, certified drivers for SolidWorks, Creo, SiemensNX, AutoDesk, etc... For the user base of Quadro and Radeon Pro cards, the cards themselves are a small fraction of the cost (software cost are a lot higher and so are the cost when something might go wrong because of a bit flip, hence ECC).


When you're using them in compute applications, ECC makes a lot of sense. It's pretty much a requirement for a data center, render farm, HPC cluster... but for individual workstations, it's overkill.

Apple's PR stunt with VA Tech lead to a lot of discussions about this. Memory these days is quite reliable (and that was back in the late 90's), so with a single workstation with four DIMMs you'd be looking at an average of one memory error a month under continuous use. For us that would mean a bad pixel or two here and there. But with 1100 workstations each with 4 DIMMs, that brought the average up to one memory error per HOUR, which made the cluster unusable for its intended purpose (large scale clustered simulations).

For our sorts of use though, at the workstation level, ECC is overkill. That's probably why there's such a significant premium for it, the market for it is pretty small. But if you need ECC, you can't do without it.

To be honest I'm not even sure that ECC would matter for most renderfarms; you'd get a bad pixel now and then if you ran a months-long render, but we don't do simulations where that one bad pixel will end up propagating into the next frame.

But if you can afford to build a render farm big enough for memory errors to matter, then you might as well take advantage of the peace of mind you'd get from having ECC, and in any case the systems that come with service contracts are designed around the assumption that they'll require ECC, so they all have it.

Even though most of us don't and never will, because even when we're successful, we aren't using applications where it's likely to matter enough to justify the extra money.
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 6:03 pm

ECC is a need for medical use etc. It's when mistake can lead to serious complications. It's also important when CPU/GPU performs huge amount of calculation for eg. 1 month (like weather simulation). For typical video usage like in Resolve ECC is about meaningless.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 6:36 pm

ECC is usually for BI / OCTO or more CPUs : server usage ...
Much more expensive and useless for a single processor :oops:
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 6:45 pm

Has anyone mentioned the Dell XPS 9570? (I only skimmed the thread).

It comes in a 4K version and is targeted at video editors & the like.

Sara Dietchy did a good review here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uIy8n-nsB4&t=303s

She's a power user and has been reviewing a bunch of laptops in the process of switching from Apple herself. I think she settled on this one. It's probably the one I'd buy right now.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 7:36 pm

VioletWolf wrote: Has anyone mentioned the Dell XPS 9570?


Hi.

I can't recommend the Dell XPS 15 9570, even with the 6 core with Core i7-8750H. According to this link is it not optimized for max performance.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS- ... 738.0.html

What the link is telling is that customers buying the Dell with the i7-8750H think that they buy the performance of the i7-8750H, but they don't. The pay the price of the i7-8750H, but got less performance.

Normally I recommend people to get a medium to large sized laptop, so they can get rid of the generated heat.

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 9:33 pm

There are so many things more important to consider in a laptop than squeezing every last cycle out of the chips though. Such as:

Screen quality
Touch pad / Keyboard
Customer Support
Longevity / durability
Battery Life
Portability

If your going to need to cache your effects anyway, why would it matter if you have to do so at 4 instead of 5 plugins when you need to run 7. Either way you'd have to cache. A few cycles would make little difference.

When using Resolve as intended with Optimized Media, Proxies, and Caches you can run smoothly on almost any machine.

Sara (in the video) who is a power user / video editor, spent a year testing every laptop she could, and found the Dell to check all the boxes. And myself as a long-time Dell power user, I'm speaking from first-hand experience when I say they are next best thing (equal even) to Mac in quality. Best track pads, keyboards, screens among the competitors.
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostSun Mar 24, 2019 10:28 pm

If Dell could make laptop without coil noise and other high pitch noises.
I tried XPS few years ago and since then every next model seems to have same issue. Dell seems to unable to fix it.
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Newguy

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostMon Mar 25, 2019 1:30 am

alienware area 51m
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Greg_E

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostMon Mar 25, 2019 3:55 am

Rakesh Malik wrote:Avid needs to get with the times, then. Sigh...


Biggest understatement of the year, they don't want to listen to what I have to say about the things that are driving first time users away from their product. There is a lot that can be liked, but the disappoint in so many ways right now. Far too set in their tracks with blinders on to even consider the kind of changes that are needed for fear of making a very small number of Hollywood level people mad. And everything I want changed would not cause an issue to the traditional users. But this is way off topic.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostMon Mar 25, 2019 8:38 am

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:If Dell could make laptop without coil noise and other high pitch noises.
I tried XPS few years ago and since then every next model seems to have same issue. Dell seems to unable to fix it.
Threre is way worse issues with the XPS 9750, stay away as far as you can. Bios 1.8.1 may have finally fixed the constant hard freeze issues for me, but I only use that version for 2 days. Thermal and VRM design is a joke, just as their version of the iGPU driver. It took them more than a year of firmware updates to fix the worst issues, but there is nothing that can change the thermal design. I'm running it without the bottom cover sitting on a big cooling pad.
5950x, 3090, 128GB.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostMon Mar 25, 2019 9:00 am

Ok, I suggest MSI lineup especially with MAX-Q design. It is thin for a 17inch. Very thin.
I have the GS73VR 7RG with GTX1070. MSI have done a fantastic job about thermal throttling.
The result is... that never throttles. Never.
Not in heavy DR, Premiere, AEF jobs, not when gaming, not when photoshopping.

In DR, 4k 25fps with HEVC 10bit (Fuji X-T3 footage), I edit in realtime without proxies, or optimized media. Including color nodes.

For a laptop workstation, it is crucial not to throttle and have constant performance.
Yeah, maybe MAX-Q have 10 or 15% less performance, but is constant.
Temperature never exceeds 88-90C.

Also have thunderbolt 3, and 100% sRBG monitor.
The 16GB models come with 1 module, so you have 1 empty for another 16GB module.

You can find 2017-2018 models as used and save serious money. Or try the the new models.
Either way, you should be happy...
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostMon Mar 25, 2019 6:25 pm

lefteris wrote:Ok, I suggest MSI lineup especially with MAX-Q design. It is thin for a 17inch. Very thin.
I have the GS73VR 7RG with GTX1070. MSI have done a fantastic job about thermal throttling.
The result is... that never throttles. Never.


A friend bought a year old MSI for video editing recently and has been very happy with it. They're a bit on the ugly side, but you can't have everything.

MSI's a solid company. I've been building workstations with their components for many years without a single issue.
Last edited by VioletWolf on Tue Mar 26, 2019 5:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostMon Mar 25, 2019 9:11 pm

Newguy wrote:alienware area 51m

+1.
see

MacPro 7,1 16 core, 192GB, MacOS 14.4, Vega II Duo. Antelope Pure 2 & Orion 32+, UA Apollo x8. RAID-4 Thunderbay 6, RAID-0 Sonnet M.2 4x4. MiniMon 4k, Dell U3415W & BenQ SW2700PT. Nuendo, Wavelab, Resolve Studio 18.6.5.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostTue Mar 26, 2019 10:29 am

8-) Even those have serious limitations:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware ... 667.0.html

high CPU+GPU power simply doesn't fit into any laptop.
Things like:
"requires two AC adapters for full performance" doesn't sound good.
You also basically can't use this without AC power either and looks like you have to get use to noise.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostTue Mar 26, 2019 6:19 pm

Very nice machines. But wow 8.5 pounds (3.87 Kg)! lol. and that's without the two massive power supplies. 1.5 hour battery life.

I have an XPS 17 and it's great to have the screen size but it's definitely not a "portable" machine. I take it to the studio and back in the car. It's a "portable desktop". But if I needed something for on-the-go: business trips, airplanes, coffee shops I'd get something 15" and better battery life.

NOT arguing or trolling, just trying to add to thread to help buyers weigh their needs. There's no perfect machine which can make these decisions difficult lol

Laptops are all a compromise to some extent, and your actual usage and list of needs have to be considered carefully. (In hindsight I would not have bought my 17" because it's too heavy and poor battery life).
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Paul Draper

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostTue Mar 26, 2019 8:40 pm

VioletWolf wrote:Very nice machines. But wow 8.5 pounds (3.87 Kg)! lol. and that's without the two massive power supplies. 1.5 hour battery life.
NOT arguing or trolling, just trying to add to thread to help buyers weigh their needs. There's no perfect machine which can make these decisions difficult lol
Yeah ... hate to say it, but if you're OK with the so-called lol 'Apple tax' (ie, most expensive OS in the world), I had a 15" 2018 MacBook Pro here for a week or so - 6 core i7, Vega20, 32GB, 1TB + external Samsung SSD (with now a TB3 model available). I sent it back for refund (see many other fora about all that), however: the performance with DRStudio & FCPX in particular was indeed very impressive. My overall take on that was, wait until the next 2019 Macbook Pro, supposedly 16" 4k screen, but more centrally: hopefully a new chassis design to better cope with thermals and the rest; maybe a better keyboard as well. In my view, the 2018 MBP /5 year old design is a bit of a kludge, but then Intel did lie about the 10nm roadmap.

Back to the topic: if the price is cool, the MBP is highly portable and in my experience sure has decent grunt for NLE 4k work. As per my sig: I split the difference & went for a studio workstation & a laptop for the road that doesn't do everything, but certainly works more than well enough for ingest, metadata, previewing, basic CC & trimming etc.
Last edited by Paul Draper on Tue Mar 26, 2019 8:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostTue Mar 26, 2019 8:53 pm

Paul Draper wrote: As per my sig: I split the difference & went for a studio workstation & a laptop for the road that doesn't do everything, but certainly works more that well enough for ingest, metadata, previewing, basic CC & trimming etc.


The more I look into this, the more I think I'll want/need to do the same. Probably an off lease (refurbished) HP Z and whatever video card(s) I can throw in there to make things work well. I think I can get a really nice desktop with lots of power for the same price as a decent (almost works) laptop.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostTue Mar 26, 2019 10:00 pm



THE 5-STEP SYSTEM for Smooth Playback on Any Laptop - DaVinci Resolve:

After watching this video I realized that Davinci, although power hungry, has options that allow for portable work situations on a budget.

(How to use optimized media, proxies, and computer management to get the job done)

The more I dig into Davinci the more I absolutely love it
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostTue Mar 26, 2019 10:51 pm

But you do know that creating proxies or optimised media for 4K compressed footage will take you ages?
It's not like you load 2h of h265 source footage, press a button and after 10 min. you have optimised media :) It will take good hours to do it.
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostWed Mar 27, 2019 3:48 am

Ah you young people. So spoiled lol ;)

We had to to transcode proxies uphill (in both directions) when I was a kid. /jk

But seriously I can remember it taking days to render proxies for a simple music video in the mid 90's. Then editing in a postage stamp sized window lol
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Re: Best 2019 Labtop (workstation) for DR 15

PostWed Mar 27, 2019 2:21 pm

VioletWolf wrote:But seriously I can remember it taking days to render proxies for a simple music video in the mid 90's. Then editing in a postage stamp sized window lol


Me too, back when DV format was a blessing because it moved so easily. Also the height of mjpeg encoding and Avid hardware cards that helped the process. I still have some of that old Avid stuff kicking around that I didn't throw out yet, not sure why I still have it. Might have some old Mac G3 parts around too.

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