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A New Laptop?!
    #23256336 -

Hello all. Not sure if this really belongs here, but I figured it is relevant to technology...

I am currently looking to buy a new laptop and have been checking out the ASUS ZenBooks. Ideally, I want one with an i7, 2-3GHz, and a solid state drive, as I will be using the laptop for music production (via Reason 6) and psychological research, but I want to get into video editing as well.

This one is most ideal, but a bit out of my price range: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232926&cm_re=asus_zenbook-_-34-232-926-_-Product

But then I found a refurbished 4th generation version for about $400 less: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232926&cm_re=asus_zenbook-_-34-232-926-_

Is there going to be a huge difference between the two? Is it worth paying an extra $400 to grab the 6th generation version? Also, I am curious as to how much difference there is between an i7 and i5... would an i5 be sufficient for non-professional video/photo editing and music production on Reason 6? I found this, which is actually my price range: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232776&cm_re=asus_zenbook-_-34-232-776-_-Product

Any insight or help is greatly appreciated as I know jack shit about computers!


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"a note for asses: what is very convincing, is not necessarily true - it is merely convincing"

primus------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------mama didn't raise no fool

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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: unsui888]
    #23256575 -

I'm not up with laptop models currently, but in my opinion, buying a laptop is a lot like buying a car. The moment you take the thing out of the store, it looses value. Set your budget and then get a second hand laptop, almost new and you'll save hundreds or for the same price you'd spend on a brand new laptop, you could get a superior model second hand that's still boxed.


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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: Magenta]
    #23263972 -

A note specific to ASUS: They make some nice laptops, but they have a tendency to bite off more than they can chew. Example: my old ASUS K53SV (as well as many others around the world, apparently) had this issue where the heat sink/vent and power input were right next to each other out of design necessity, with...melty...consequences about a year after I bought it.

Got that replaced for free, needed a new charger, new motherboard and new laptop case, yay two year warranty, but the battery no longer charged (fresh out of the box). It worked off battery for the 79% it showed up from the factory with, then refused to recharge. Sent it in twice more, according to the company they replaced my motherboard and battery two more times, but it still only operates as a desktop.

That being said, it is by far the best laptop I've ever owned in terms of power for price. Though, I scraped together a desktop that can still be considered near top of the line (without liquid cooling and triple tethered GPU mining and other computerphile junk) for 600$ half a year ago. I don't notice any FPS drop or lag playing some recent and system intensive games while doing video rendering.

Point is: Video rendering takes lots of power, and music work tends to attach you to a lot of external hardware (mixers and keyboards) once you get past the basics. How necessary is your ability to take your computer with you, and is it worth the extra 500-900$? Especially for a laptop built by a company that in my experience excels at literally everything except operating as a laptop?

EDIT: video work also takes *TONS* of hard drive space. Like, an hour of raw HD video would take up anywhere between 100-130GB. You'd be putting all your data on an external drive anytime you want to do *anything* involving video work, and you're limited to less than 2 hours of raw video on the last link you posted. Desktops generally come with hard drive expansion slots which laptops do not have, and storage is much cheaper in desktop size. Also comes in up to 8TB now, though based on cost that's back in computerphile territory. 4TB has been enough for my video needs. Note that if you decide to keep your raw footage on an external drive and render from that, you'll be looking at literal days of rendering per hour of video, though I don't know what USB 3.0 can do from experience yet.

Edited by Kryptos (05/24/16 12:30 AM)

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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: Kryptos]
    #23278052 -

anyone else care to chime in?


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"a note for asses: what is very convincing, is not necessarily true - it is merely convincing"

primus------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------mama didn't raise no fool

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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: unsui888]
    #23288110 -

Yeah, for video editing/rendering, you are going to want an i7.

And why do you need a laptop? You have far more options and expandability with desktop. And you get much more bang for your buck.
As mentioned video editing takes tons of storage space and laptops are usually extremely limited in the HDD department, usually only having one space or maybe two for a HDD or SSD, so you will be relegated to an external drive.
Shit.... 1TB SSDs are in the $200-250 range now.. that's how much I paid for my 80GB like 4-5 years ago. RAID 01 with 1TB SSDs fuck yeah?

Also laptops are notorious for generating heat (and building up dust fast) and doing a lot of video editing/rendering is torture on a system, you presumably want long life and dependability.. you will have much better cooling options with a desktop.

IMO build a custom desktop and you will get much more value for your money and not to mention have TONS more options and room for expansion.
Unless you ABSOLUTELY need a laptop for portability because you are traveling 90% of the time.. then whatever.. otherwise, build a desktop.


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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: Shroomism]
    #23298704 -

Well, I dunno about a 4k 15" screen to be honest, a lot of Windows app devs are slacking big time on supporting native resolution, so they'll either be ridiculously tiny or you'll have to change the scaling and they'll look fuzzy and fucked up...

I'm sure adobe has that shit addressed, as well as IE and Chrome for browsers,  but I be very surprised if your DAW had support for its native resolution, plus myriads of other apps you might want to use.  I wouldn't buy a 4k laptop.  At least the laptop has some really fast I/O w/ thunderbolt as an option, but until more people own high pixel per inch screens and the market demands it, app developers probably won't get off their ass and get the job done because it's not the easiest thing in the world to implement.

I know many musicians who use laptops during their live performances so it's something to consider shroomism.  Also a laptop can be great to work with if you have two separate places like work and home, you can have one machine that you can dock into work/ home monitor keyboard mouse and that can have a lot of merit....

Really I think how serious of a video editor you want to be is what it comes down to..... If it's a matter of productivity and making money the i7 is the only way to go... otherwise it's just going to take longer to complete your project, it's not the end of the world....  i've used a dual core i5 3lb notebook to edit many a 10 min youtube clip or so :shrug:  Maybe if you're editing 4k videos the i7 would be the sensible option......


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Everything is better than it was the last time.  I'm good.

If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.

It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence.

I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too.  If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.

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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: CosmicJoke]
    #23298731 -

music and video work are two completely different beasts though.. in terms of the processing power and space required.
I'm sure you can get by with a laptop especially as just a hobbyist.. but you'll still get more mileage overall with a desktop :shrug:


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Re: A New Laptop?! [Re: Shroomism]
    #23300318 -

There's no doubt about it, a desktop is far superior for video editing.  My sandy bridge desktop can still outperform my haswell i7 laptop in such regards.....  but a lot of people do it on laptops, even professionally, but it's definitely not the best bang for the buck... again really fast I/O is one of the things I'd think about and yah the i7, a dock and hooking up to a bigger monitor, external keyboard and mouse...  And if you're doing a lot of it, I'd buy the extended warranty and sell once it's up if you've been running your laptop at 102c a lot of the time for a few years....

In his situation ideally I'd probably own both.


--------------------
Everything is better than it was the last time.  I'm good.

If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.

It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence.

I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too.  If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
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