Advice needed for a new PC

[spoRv]

No, didn't miss anything! Apart, maybe, that a desktop is better!

[Koopa Luath]

Whatever I get, I'll be putting DaVinci Resolve 12.5, VirtualDub, Avisynth, and FFMPEG on it for sure.

[Evit]

A laptop for this kind of work? Mmh. Do you require portability? Because desktop PCs are much better suited for it, for several reasons and they cost less than a laptop equivalent

[Koopa Luath]

Mm, I might be carrying it around from time to time. But it's not desktop vs. laptop that'll make the difference, it's the specs. You can't have a restoration PC, desktop or laptop, without good specs. Apart from what I mentioned, I'll also be looking for a 1080p display. According to Laptop Magazine, it's the minimum resolution for any good creative professional (I'm assuming video editing and fan restorations and the like fall under that category).

The last time I bought a laptop, I was taken in by its Blu-ray drive. Now that I have an external Blu-ray drive (and not just a Blu-ray drive, but a Blu-ray BURNER), optical drives are no longer my greatest concern when I buy a laptop, and since I'm striving to be a creative professional I'm going to be a lot less forgiving this time around as I look for my next laptop. Specs are always key.

As for the processor's cores, I'm not really worried about whether I should get a dual-core or a quad-core, as the old adage of quad-core being better than dual-core, while definitely true just a couple of years ago, is now no longer necessarily the case.

[MrBrown]

Even the Specs are a pro for Desktop.
With a custom Build Desktop, you can outperform Laptops in the price range, and youcan upgrade easier.
In a Desktop you have space, for better cooling systems, more Graphic Cards, other internal peripheral you may need.
But if you need it portable, yeah, there is no choice.

Well, 1080p is really the minimum. You should consider going to a better resolution, with 4k Movies/Video around the corner.
At least it should be able to bring 4k to an external Video screen.


I am on the edge of getting a new PC also in near distant future.
My PC here in the city where I work each week is dying a painful death.
I already had to exchange the graphic card some years ago. (Well the old graphic card was fine.. until some of the passiv cooling elements got lost, and fell into the GPU fan...)
But end of last year the new Graphic Card died. And from its 8 GB RAM 4 GB died also.
Occassionally the PC just freeze and has to be rebooted.
Or it take some effort, to boot it at all after it was shut down some days.

I already got two internal HardDrives:
For System and Software: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01K375CDY
For storage: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M1NHCZT/

I wait for that as PC:
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01N9T8WI1/

The only thing, I still don't know is about the RAM... 16gb should be enough.. but.. I want to go for 32 gb...

I want to have a nice PC for some retro gaming, for a bit of gaming, for browsing the net, and, when I ever get a good gaming PC, I want to use it as HTPC without needing to upgrade in some nearer future.

[Evit]

Granted that you need an i7 at least (don't waste your time on i5 if you plan on rendering) with 16GB of RAM, like Mr Brown suggested, you should be worried about cooling it off too, which could be a problem with laptops. If you work within the 1080p range you should be able to render a whole project in around 6 hours but who knows how long it will take with 4K files, you don't want to leave a laptop working at full steam for days... but that's just me. If portability is necessary though I guess you don't really have much choice. All I'm saying is that on the paper i7 computers with 16GB of RAM all sounds the same but if it's constantly overheating you can lose a lot in performance, increase render time and also lower your computer mileage on the long run.

@MrBrown 16GB for the time being they are plenty, I can render and do many other things in the meantime and still not get anywhere near full ram usage. In the future who knows... but I think once you have 16GB of RAM the only thing you should worry about is CPU. Obviously you want to make sure it's a fast RAM, but you already know that

As for the Intel NUC PCs, I think they suffer the same issues of laptops and they have been reported as being very noisy with CPU-intensive programs

[MrBrown]

Max RAM speed is 2133MHz with the NUC.
Yeah, they suffer the same problems as laptops, but at least I don't have to pay for build in Monitor, mouse and keyboard...

[Koopa Luath]

If I were to do 4K on a laptop, would I need at least 32 GB RAM?

[MrBrown]

I would say it depends on the tasks you want to do with the 4k video.

If you just want to process it through filters, and watch it processed, then you need more processor capacity.
If you want to dig into editing, like cutting and such things were you have no predefined work-process, but have to put up much videodata into a programm to work with it, then you need RAM.
Maybe you can get a Laptop where upgrading RAM is an easier to do task, so you start with 16GB, and, if you feel in, like, a year that you need more, just upgrade the RAM.

@Evit:
I just want to play some retro gaming, like SNES emulation, and newer 2D titles that won't even need anything near that amount of RAM.
It is more something like "WANT" instead of "NEED"

[Evit]

Ahhhh it's just a side PC... In that case I was thinking to get something similar for my parents so let me know how it is if you ever get it.