Suggest bare minimum video encoding laptop.

[ChaiBabbaChai]

That means RELIABILITY is #1 consideration. #2 is CPU (so i3 or i5, probably) and system bandwidth. SSD? or not? An intel X-25V is probably fine, or an 80GB X-25M.

GO

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Why do you need to video encode on a laptop? Additionally, what do you encode, and what does quality matter to you? Intel QuickSync as well as nVidia's CUDA all allow quick encoding, but CUDA was regarded as looking terrible, and neither can do anything but general quick encodes.

 

[Emulex]

QOSmio with tmpgenc will smoke just about anything with its dedicated transcoding card

 

[Hacp]

Wait for SandyBridge with quicksync. That's the holy grail of encoding.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

to answer your question, TCR, I am just doing the research, this isn't for me. The person wants a laptop, and has ruled out a desktop even though I have made it clear that they can get twice the encoding power for half the price of a laptop..

Also, I know many of you here are all about the newest, next architecture or tock, but the person I'm looking around for is ONLY interested in an older laptop that can be had for half the new price, or less. I'm wondering about certain components to look for, certain models of laptops that have great video cards or chipsets, etc. for encoding. I know my ATI FireGL has some encoding features on the GPU, so maybe something like that in a laptop, like you've mentioned about CUDA and quicksync, to offload some of what the CPU has to do. I would look into a used Sager or something, but that is most likely out of the price range. We are talking $300-$500. Old is fine, as long as it's been well maintained so that reliability isn't an issue. A core 2 duo would be fast enough, but I would like to stay away from a used Dell for several reasons.