Please, help me to choose a laptop for DaVinci

Hi!

I would like to deep in DaVinci Resolve, and now I'm choosing a good laptop for this program. Previously I had iMac, Late 2012, and even was able to edit an HD-video in braw-format; of course, it was painful, but, nevertheless, possible.

I have around 1 000$. And look also at used laptops.

Most probably, throughout this year, minimum, I will edit only in 1080p (then I would like to buy a Blackmagic cinema camera and maybe shoot in 4K -- 4K isn't, however, necessary). At first I will edit in the free version, but soon, maybe in a month, I plan to uprage for the studio variant.

Editing video is the most demanding thing for my next laptop (I don't play games on PC), but I also want it to be compact enought (not heavier than 2 kg) and with a comfortable keyboard and a good screen (if it's possible, touch-sensitive and 4K).

I'm looking now at XPS 15 9570, used one, with i7-8750H and GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q, 16/512, 4K. It's around 1 000$. Will it be okay for my needs?

(My girlfriend has a Dell with i5-7200U, with no dedicated GPU. I've tested it in DR, with 4K. Of course, the playback was very laggy, but when I made optimized media, everything became smoothly enough to work (I mead a playback, without effects), at least at Fusion.)

Thank you very much in advance!

[Peter Chamberlain]

Moved to Resolve forum

Hi.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O, fusion, compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better.

4K videos have 4 times the pixels of HD. And for 4K is the absolute minimum 6 GB of vRam on the Graphics Card, but minimum 8 GB of vRam or more are recommended.
Graphics Cards with 6 GB or 8 GB of vRam generate a lot of heat, that is difficult to get rid of in a small cabinet, as in a tiny Laptop. So most Laptop slow down the speed of both the CPU and GPU.

Normally do I recommend people on the road to look for a medium to large sized Labtop, so it can get rid of the generated heat.

And you can't do the same work on a 8 core Laptop as on a 12 or 16 core Desktop, but for people on the road is the best laptops for Resolve, a powerfull Gamer Laptop with extra Ram and may be an extra MVMe SSD.

Can I ask if you have considered a Desktop? A cheap Desktop is a much better choice for Resolve.

Regards Carsten.

Hi.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O, fusion, compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better.

4K videos have 4 times the pixels of HD. And for 4K is the absolute minimum 6 GB of vRam on the Graphics Card, but minimum 8 GB of vRam or more are recommended.
Graphics Cards with 6 GB or 8 GB of vRam generate a lot of heat, that is difficult to get rid of in a small cabinet, as in a tiny Laptop. So most Laptop slow down the speed of both the CPU and GPU.

Normally do I recommend people on the road to look for a medium to large sized Labtop, so it can get rid of the generated heat.

And you can't do the same work on a 8 core Laptop as on a 12 or 16 core Desktop, but for people on the road is the best laptops for Resolve, a powerfull Gamer Laptop with extra Ram and may be an extra MVMe SSD.

Can I ask if you have considered a Desktop? A cheap Desktop is a much better choice for Resolve.

Regards Carsten.

Thank you for the reply!

Now I'm not looking at desktop PCs, because in the near future I, probably, will travel a lot and I would like to have a mobile computer.

But what do you think -- will XPS 9570 with i7-8750H and GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q (4GB) enough for my purposes? I wouldn't edit 4K. I have now only Panasonic camera, 1080p/50 FPS.

You'll have to add 300 for a PC if you don't own Studio yet. But since you've been on a Mac before, why not the MB Air M1?

You'll have to add 300 for a PC if you don't own Studio yet. But since you've been on a Mac before, why not the MB Air M1?

This MB, with this CPU, will be a good option for DR? I'm not even looking at Macbooks, because I think they are too expensive for my budget And can't offer such power as Windows options for the same price. Do I understand correctly?

Well, the Air M1 is limited by its meagre GPU, it's an entry level machine. Basic editing and some simple grading works very well on it, all the way from H.264 to even R3D. But GPU-heavy effects or multi-cam? Forget it.

But the notion that Mac can't compete in price/performance, which held true for a long time, may be obsolete by now. There is no Windows notebook for the price of an MB Air M1 that can compete.

That said, if you need more power, wait for the true MacBook Pro, which should be coming later this year. I would not buy any Intel or AMD based laptop any more, they are going down. Even Microsoft and AMD are working on the move to ARM-based machines, with Intel trailing seriously behind.

A short term solution might be a second-hand gamer's laptop. They tend to sell their 'outdated' stuff pretty often…