PC Laptop Choices for best Photoshop, Lightroom, and video editing - Processor, Graphics, Memory, HD

[ThomasRBoag]

Incorrigible PC User replacing tower - What is advantage of latest generation i9 over i7? NVIDIA GeForce a best choice? SSD over SATA?
Assisting professional photo-artist in purchasing new laptop to replace old PC tower that is failing. A long time PC person, Does a lot of scanning, photo adjustment, and newsletter editing. Not a gamer. Budget 1-2K$
We note when talking to Dell that they offer i9 intel chip laptops (and even i11) and wonder whether a person who does tons of photoshop and Lightroom work and who is just getting into making videos would see any benefit over an i7 chip laptop. We cannot find much on the internet that isn't advertising hype.
Would appreciate advice or links to suggestions.
Tom

 

[Replytoken]

Welcome to the forums. There are a lot of factors one should consider when choosing a machine. But if you are looking at performance of parts and chips, then I might suggest looking at Puget Systems website as they do a lot of testing. They are not the final word, but they do a decent job. Here is a link to a number of their LR articles: Search Results for "lightroom" . Hopefully you will find some chip performance info. that will be helpful.

--Ken

 

[ThomasRBoag]

Welcome to the forums. There are a lot of factors one should consider when choosing a machine. But if you are looking at performance of parts and chips, then I might suggest looking at Puget Systems website as they do a lot of testing. They are not the final word, but they do a decent job. Here is a link to a number of their LR articles: Search Results for "lightroom" . Hopefully you will find some chip performance info. that will be helpful.

--Ken

Thanks, Ken, Victoria had mentioned Puget Systems and I am studying. They had some brands I have not heard of before. Maybe try to contact them.

 

[Replytoken]

Thanks, Ken, Victoria had mentioned Puget Systems and I am studying. They had some brands I have not heard of before. Maybe try to contact them.

They sell their own lines of PC's. They are expensive, but many of the owners say they are quite happy with them, and that they are well supported. In general, CPU and RAM sit at or near the to of the list for speed. Fast dives and fast interfaces are also near the top. GPU is not as important for LR as for PS. With respect to laptops, will you be using an external monitor or just the screen? Laptop screens are all over the map in terms of quality and gamut, and the good ones tend to be on expensive models. You might get more for you money with an external monitor, not to mention more working real estate.

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[ThomasRBoag]

We do use a large 30" external screen much of the time. My Rotary friend, Harvey, does a lot of photo-artist portraits of local people. He uses Lightroom a lot. I have not used so much for years. Most of our projects together have been collections of photos that we put together into a newsletter (in Word - PDF) or PowerPoint presentation. Harvey has an old HP laptop and I have a recent Latitude 5290 (plus two PC desktops I use for editing). Last year we put together a large number of really neat photos of a local place called Sturgeon's Mill (restored running on steam - a major project) into a PowerPoint loop then we "burned" that into MP4 using PowerPoint. That didn't work so well as the playback stalled repeatedly - even PowerPoint itself stalled when playing a loop. Suspected CPU or disk limitations but could not get to the bottom of it. We tried Microsoft tech help to advise us and they couldn't tell us whether PowerPoint has a problem or what kind of laptop we should be using. We then put the slides into a MP4 loop with another program (Movavi) and got it to work.... mostly. Bought a copy of Adobe Premiere to try but got stalled on project due to pandemic this year. As you see, we are real beginners where it comes to video or MP4. Eventually we would like to put together some shot video of Rotary club activities and be able to mix them up with still photos and illustrations. Right now we are trying to pick a better laptop (within $2K budget) that will let us experiment more with making MP4's

 

[Replytoken]

I do not do video, but I can say that the requirements for editing video often take a machine into a whole new category, and a GPU then pretty much becomes a necessity. If you were showing your final products on a screen, did you match the final output of the video for the device? No sense making an HD device choke on a 4k piece of footage.

In all, I think that if video is what are are hoping to edit, or at least a good portion of the time, then I would not spec. a machine to LR, but rather towards your video editing needs. The two are not as similar as one might be led to believe.

--Ken