Tweet
While I have gamely modified my nearly four and a half year old HP Touchsmart tx2130ea to extend its useful life (three OS upgrades, several hard drives and now an SSD, and USB3 via the PCie port) I have given in to my daughter's regular reminders that she would like to give it a new home when I eventually upgrade it. It has a Wacom touch screen and she has great plans for using this (she is doing Art for GCSE).
I love my little HP but the latest versions of Adobe Creative Suite (6) and Lightroom, among other things, are really thrashing the poor little thing's processor.
So I am on a quest for a more up to date replacement but in these bad economic times the budget is not generous. I have been doing some research and I have decided to follow some others here and go down the refurbished route as there are massive savings to be made and I don't mind the odd blemish or two on the case - I will be adding my own soon enough!
This is what I feel I need:
I love my little HP but the latest versions of Adobe Creative Suite (6) and Lightroom, among other things, are really thrashing the poor little thing's processor.
So I am on a quest for a more up to date replacement but in these bad economic times the budget is not generous. I have been doing some research and I have decided to follow some others here and go down the refurbished route as there are massive savings to be made and I don't mind the odd blemish or two on the case - I will be adding my own soon enough!
This is what I feel I need:
- Ideally a 2nd generation Intel Core i7 CPU although a fast Core i5 would be acceptable. A suitable Core i5 CPU would be about four times faster than my old HP's 2GHz AMD X64 Turion CPU and an i7 would be about 7 times faster. These CPUs also feature extra instruction sets for accelerating multimedia processing, so with some applications like video editing the performance increase would be even higher.
- Dedicated nVidia GPU graphics with at least 1GB of video RAM and a minimum of 96 CUDA cores onboard. This is the minimum specification for enabling hardware acceleration for video editing but will also boost GPU-accelerated features in Photoshop and Lightroom. CUDA cores are parallel processors dedicated to crunching graphics data. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro, which can benefit from Adobe Mercury Playback Engine hardware acceleration, can work far better with a graphics card like this. At the moment a 10 minute video clip may take a couple of hours to render on my old HP while on my new laptop I'm hoping for rendering to be something like a quarter or a fifth of the time - maybe even better, and have near real time previewing while editing.
- Plenty of RAM - at least 8GB.
- A decent screen, probably 15.6 inches there don't seem to be any smaller affordable laptops which meet my spec. for CPU and graphics support. I don't think I can stretch to a 1920 wide screen so it's likely to be a 1366x768 one.
- Built in USB3 ports and eSata for a fast external drive. Even better if the DVD drive can be swapped out for a sata 2nd hard drive caddy.
- Hard disk - not that bothered as I have some really good drives here I can retro-fit, including SSD.
- Not too bulky and heavy.
Comment