Laptop for video streaming/editing

[CasuallyDressed]

Hi all!

I'm Rory, I do the videos for Nintendo Life. At home, I have a fairly well specced system - i5 2500k, GTX 560Ti 1GB.

However, at the office, we don't really have anything powerful enough for streaming live video from different sources - videogame capture cards, 1080p cameras etc. We mainly use Macs.

At the moment, my job at NL is part-time, so building a desktop wouldn't be in my best interests. Ideally, I'd like a laptop that's powerful enough for my needs that I can take to the office when I'm in the area.

So, what kind of spec would I need for streaming 1080p footage with webcam overlays and microphone narration? We use XSplit which I know can be a resource hog. For perspective, my i5/560Ti machine is more than powerful enough for this.

 

[whyso]

Hi all!

I'm Rory, I do the videos for Nintendo Life. At home, I have a fairly well specced system - i5 2500k, GTX 560Ti 1GB.

However, at the office, we don't really have anything powerful enough for streaming live video from different sources - videogame capture cards, 1080p cameras etc. We mainly use Macs.

At the moment, my job at NL is part-time, so building a desktop wouldn't be in my best interests. Ideally, I'd like a laptop that's powerful enough for my needs that I can take to the office when I'm in the area.

So, what kind of spec would I need for streaming 1080p footage with webcam overlays and microphone narration? We use XSplit which I know can be a resource hog. For perspective, my i5/560Ti machine is more than powerful enough for this.

An i7 quad (ex 3630qm/3610qm) is about as powerful as your i5 in highly multithreaded tasks. An i5 is a good step down and any mobile amd APU shouldn't be considered if you are putting high cpu load on it.

Also, get lots of RAM.

I'd get an i7 + 8GB as it will easily meet your needs and should be good if you decide to do more on it as well.

 

[CasuallyDressed]

I'd get an i7 + 8GB as it will easily meet your needs and should be good if you decide to do more on it as well.

Thanks for that. Any sort of clock frequency I should be looking at as a minimum? What about the GPU? I'm totally clueless on mobile GPUs, I must admit.

 

[whyso]

I'd get an i7 + 8GB as it will easily meet your needs and should be good if you decide to do more on it as well.

Thanks for that. Any sort of clock frequency I should be looking at as a minimum? What about the GPU? I'm totally clueless on mobile GPUs, I must admit.

Clock frequency means little because the amount of work the cpu can do per ghz varies across architectures (newer cpus require less ghz to do the same amount of work). Also mobile CPU's have turbo (so the 3630qm runs at 2.4 ghz base but can run at 3.2 ghz on all four cores if it has enough cooling or 33% faster) which is thermally limited (how hot the laptop gets). Ideally a 3630/3610qm/4700 should be perfect for even quite heavy work and will perform similar (within 10%) in a laptop with good cooling. For this reason the thermals of the laptop are more important than the frequency. For example the 4700 is about 10% faster than the 3610 but if it can't turbo because its too hot it will perform worse (2.4 ghz haswell is weaker than 3.1 ghz ivy).

Does xsplit use the gpu? If it does and it uses cuda then a nvidia gpu will be helpful (640m+). Intel's igp should be fine but because intel's drivers tend to be poor for this sort of thing I would recommend against intel.

 

[CasuallyDressed]

Does xsplit use the gpu?

I assume it does? We used a Mac with a second gen i5 @ 2.3Ghz, and it was struggling at 720p. From that, we kinda just deduced that it was the onboard graphics that was limiting the video processing. Is that not correct? Isn't that what a GPU does? Process graphics? I just assumed that the GPU was the most important factor here. My i5 desktop encodes videos like 50x faster than the i5 Mac, so surely the GPU is doing most of the work here?

 

[whyso]

Does xsplit use the gpu?

I assume it does? We used a Mac with a second gen i5 @ 2.3Ghz, and it was struggling at 720p. From that, we kinda just deduced that it was the onboard graphics that was limiting the video processing. Is that not correct? Isn't that what a GPU does? Process graphics? I just assumed that the GPU was the most important factor here. My i5 desktop encodes videos like 50x faster than the i5 Mac, so surely the GPU is doing most of the work here?

In that case you will want a decent gpu. Does the gpu use cuda? If so then you need nvidia. Personally I would recommend at least a 650/750m.