Guys, I need a new laptop...

In reply to BoxheadTim :

Weak sauce is better than no sauce.

BoxheadTim said:

In reply to Russian Warship, Go Berkeley Yourself :

My weak sauce answer - the newest model that fits in your budget as it likely has the longest lifespan left from both a hard- and software point of view.

Also, Resolve relies a lot on the graphics card for rendering, so a weaker processor (say, an i7 instead of an i9) has less impact than a weaker graphics card. 

Some codecs will use every CPU core they can get their hands on when encoding.  I'm curious to see some info about what is leveraged more on-the-fly when editing.  Its been a while since I've messed with Resolve, but its definitely resource hungry (for obvious reasons).

Anyway, +1 to Lenovo.  Your fingers get practice with that magic spot.

RE: Specific controller, I've heard some people use a 3D Connexion spacemouse for controlling resolve.  I only mention this because I always have them around me, so it would be nice to not get something application specific.

If you're looking for new, I'd probably suggest an Asus ProArt PX13.  Plenty of horsepower and excellent display.

In reply to scardeal :

$1449 is completely out of the ballpark.

TravisTheHuman said:

BoxheadTim said:

In reply to Russian Warship, Go Berkeley Yourself :

My weak sauce answer - the newest model that fits in your budget as it likely has the longest lifespan left from both a hard- and software point of view.

Also, Resolve relies a lot on the graphics card for rendering, so a weaker processor (say, an i7 instead of an i9) has less impact than a weaker graphics card. 

Some codecs will use every CPU core they can get their hands on when encoding.  I'm curious to see some info about what is leveraged more on-the-fly when editing.  Its been a while since I've messed with Resolve, but its definitely resource hungry (for obvious reasons).

 

I think some of this depends on the codec, some of it depends on the version of Resolve. In newer version they enabled use of the graphics card for rendering even in the free version (it was paid-only before, and I think it's still a paid feature if you want to run more than one graphics card).

I pretty much only use H.264 as a render targe because Tubes of U, and both the machines i use have a fairly high number of cores. On my Mac Studio it'll definitely light up the GPU cores first and doesn't make use of all of the CPU cores (IIRC it has 10), and on my PC it'll use about 6-8 out of the 12 and also massively light up the GPU.

Another item that I forgot to mention is that whatever machine RWGBY gets, I would put a brand new, fast (NVMe) SSD in it, especially when dealing with 4k resolution videos. You really need a fast and reasonably large SSD, more for editing than final rendering, IME. And for external drives you really want Thunderbolt 3 or newer, and I don't know if that's an option on the P53 or P15.

I work for a large, 4 letter company headquartered in Texas that sells a lot of laptops.  I'm going to intentionally stay out of the discussion, but if you do decide to purchase something from them, I can get a 17% employee discount off of the prices on the website.

In reply to dj06482 (Forum Supporter) :



I'll let you know.

In reply to BoxheadTim :

Doing my best to keep up here, but it's like a non-car guy listening to car guys talking about cam specs.   Steeeeep curve here.

Do the non 4 letter companies have better docking options?  I have a dual USB-C dock from them and god damn it's a piece of E36 M3. (And it's my 3rd or 4th)

I miss port replicators 

*get off my lawn.gif*

In reply to Russian Warship, Go Berkeley Yourself :

Sorry. Let me see if I can explain this a little better.

In order to be able to watch videos on a computer (and your TV is a computer as well), the video has to follow a specific standard so the playback device knows what to do with what's otherwise just a bunch of data. H.264 is one of these standards and commonly used for YouTube videos.

The video data that Resolve processes is often in a different (standardized) format, plus you're editing it so you remove some video, shift some others around etc. In order to turn those edited pieces of video into a coherent file that you can watch, upload to YouTube etc, it uses a piece of software called a codec that basically turns the edited video into the desired format (like H.264). Modern graphics cards (that's the "GPU" part I mentioned above) often know how to do this encoding by themselves (in hardware), so a program like Resolve divides up the video data into multiple pieces that it feeds the GPU the data it wants to have converted and collects the results. That's usually more efficient than having your main processor (the CPU, that'll be the i7/i9 bit from Intel mentioned before) doing the same conversion, because the GPU specializes in processing graphics data. So if Resolve can use the GPU, it'll process video faster and more efficiently than if it only can use the CPU.

The comment/recommendation about the SSD (data storage, used to be known as a "hard drive") is that because video files tend to be rather large, and an editing tool like Resolve has to read the video file(s) you're editing from the SSD and display without stuttering, you need a pretty fast drive for that. SSDs also tend to age and then croak without warning, so if I care about the data on a laptop, I tend to replace the SSD on any used laptop I buy. The type of SSD that you find in the aforementioned Lenovo workstations is of a type called 'NVMe'.

Hope that helps a bit and doesn't add more confusion.

In reply to BoxheadTim :

It does help a lot.   Thank you.

Anyone want to pick a favorite from the three eBay ThinkPads listed?

In reply to TravisTheHuman :

I can't speak to other brand's docks, but I have a WD19TB dock and it's been rock solid in the 5 years I've had it.  But then again, I'm a little OCD about staying up-to-date with all my drivers and firmware.  It's not cheap, but it's worked well.  I've deliberately tried to stay out of the brand x vs. brand y conversations, but I think that keeping firmware up-to-date is critical to the end-user experience, regardless of brand.  There may well be better (and cheaper) 3rd party dock options out there, I'm just using the one that was given to me