hello everyone, creating this thread to ask about what laptop i should get for HD video editing specifically using DaVinci. i dont want an Apple, so I’ve been eying the Acer Nitro V Gaming Laptop with Intel Core i9-13900H Processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. is this a good choice? also, im hesitant about NVIDIA’s whole boasting about their card using AI driven graphics, would this somehow affect my future work in a negative way like image smoothing on HD TVs or is this something that’s avoidable? the laptop also has 16 gigs of RAM, would i need to get larger RAM too like the G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series (XMP) DDR4 RAM 64GB (4x16GB)? i’m a dummy when it comes to this stuff, so any help would be appreciated.
Be mindful an awful lot of laptops these days solder in the RAM (meaning it is not replaceable by you or your local computer shop). Even those that don’t often have one socket soldered, the other user changeable which still presents a problem as most RAM kits are two sticks. Be extra careful checking that won’t be a problem and/or be sure there is a decent return policy for the box being opened. For video editing 32GB would be the minimum you can skate by with and I’d suggest 64GB as you muse about but it is likely an area you can sacrifice on for other needs as long as you don’t go below 32GB plus a video card with some RAM of its own. Also understand many laptops use low profile RAM for space reasons which isn’t the same as full size desktop RAM and they are not compatible with each other.
In other words for the RAM make sure it’s either not soldered in or if you can only find machines with soldered RAM you’ll need to pony up for something with more RAM out of the gate (32GB should be fine in that case, they charge two legs and an arm for 64GB from the factory).
Another thing is HEAT. I am hearing a lot of things about modern laptops with the modern intel chips where they put these incredibly inadequate heatsinks on them and they throttle performance like crazy as a result and there’s often not much at all you can do (some allow some modding of them but it’s a pain and typically only goes so far). Just because it has an i9 doesn’t mean it has heatsinks that allow that i9 to perform even as well as an i5 on a desktop with a large, efficient tower cooler. I’ve seen lately some people noticing the latest machines throttling merely on bursts of activity but the truth is you need a machine that doesn’t throttle with hours of all cores pegged to the max as transcoding (unless done on GPU which you can if you want but it’s considered worse, especially at low bitrates) will generate a lot of heat and use a lot of energy. Even if you are using GPU transcoding there are a lot of operations like filters that can only be done in the CPU so you need something that won’t throttle down to a slow grind after some minutes of all cores pushed to the max. I’m admittedly unaware of if DaVinci takes advantage of GPU encoding/transcoding and acceleration or not.