Marc,
big fan of your sense of humor, keep it up!If you wanna be sure BMD USB3 works, my advise is not to use a laptop at all. People will start thinking I'm working for gigabyte, but I cannot recommend their BRIX enough.
UK Prices, but basically £200 for the base unit, £60 for a 64GB SSD, and £40 for 4GB of RAM + OS of your choice. you pay less than for a mid-range laptop, then remote control via VNC (
or obviously I would rather people used JustMacros), if you like, you can even connect the HDMI / Display port output to a TVS / ATEM 1ME via the HDMI inputs. It works amazing for the cost, and is 4 inch by 4 inch by just over an inch think. They even come with VESA mount to making installing into a rig very easy.
I'm think I'm becoming a little bit obsessed with them.
Zero issue having the ATEM USB3 in one port, and 3 cascaded Hubs and 15 USB2 devices hanging off the other (including H264 encoder). Zero issues with USB3 on Windows 8 (although again I replace the shell with JustMacros). Whole system boots up in 7 seconds and is streaming via MX light, and passing USB3 to Black Magics MJPEG encoder for easy editable copy (store out to a USB HDD) whenever needed.
My other advise if trying this approach, is I have a strange effect where I need to pass the ATEM data through the Black Magic Design DMO decoder, when using Directshow on Windows, which I don't normally have to do with Decklink sources, but I haven't investigated as to why this is the case.
I know you are asking about a specific laptop, but I think it's worth publishing this advice, because the laptop USB3 is a bit hit and miss by most accounts, and if you want Desktop PC reliability / compatibility, at the cost and portability of a cheap laptop, there are a few other options, BRIX being a great one in my opinion, maybe go for i5 or i7 if doing local trans-coding.
Here is a screen shot showing of the low spec hardware being used, honestly to great effect, using BMDs, (
getting pretty d4mn good now), products. (Probably have to zoom in to see details)
Good Luck with whatever option you go for.
John