I want a 16gb+ RAM laptop!

Phil Young

Phil Young

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I need something with a bit more ooompth for HD video editing.

PC is a no go area for me and ideally I would have 24gb or 32gb of RAM.

Is this a possibility?

Currently running windows 7, 8gb ram, 2.3ghz duo core.

Any help appreciated!

Phil.
 
Just updated my Dell XPS i5 to 16gb ram but that's its max ... Dell Alienware with 32gb will set you back around £3000:00
 
Depends if you definately want a new laptop. I got a S/H alienware (M17x) for around the £1k mark, I believe it was from a dell outlet reseller as there were very minor cosmetic marks pointed out to me, and I upgraded the ram slightly. Running 12gb of ram right now, upgrading it further should be simple enough. That was a year ago, so I'd expect an equivilant spec one to be less now.

Despite some people ranting and raving that alienwares are overpriced for their specs compared to other companies, they are damn nice computers and in terms of quality compared to other expensive laptops I've seen, they're just on a different level. I have to admit, I was one of the ranters about how pointless alienwares were, until I got one to see what all the fuss was about :thumbs:
 
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You could get a Alienware M17x base spec other than screen and windows upgrade for £1450ish then £80 for SSD plus £140 for 4x 8GB ram. Not quite a grand but they are darn nice laptops. Remember you need Windows 7 Professional for more than 16GB of ram, not sure about windows 8 though.
 
alienware is just a rebranded dell in a flashy case and price premium so unless you need the extra GPU power (and hense poorer battery) a XPS or Precision would be better.
 
What are you using for editing?

You'll often see better performance investing in a machine with a decent CPU and potentially GPU for video work than getting something low-end and packed out with memory.
 
Have you thought about building your own ?

Or having one built ?

It's a fairly simple thing, or you could source the parts and have if built.

I had my old alienware rebuilt as since Dell took over, price has gone up and quality has gone down, so has the back up.

Cost me just over 600, i7 16g of highend RAM, with room for 16 more, and 1x 120g ssd and 2 x 1tb for storage.

Programs go on the normal drive, windows runs from ssd and also editing software.

Nothing I do puts a dent in the speed.
 
scott199 said:
Have you thought about building your own ?

Or having one built ?

It's a fairly simple thing, or you could source the parts and have if built.

I had my old alienware rebuilt as since Dell took over, price has gone up and quality has gone down, so has the back up.

Cost me just over 600, i7 16g of highend RAM, with room for 16 more, and 1x 120g ssd and 2 x 1tb for storage.

Programs go on the normal drive, windows runs from ssd and also editing software.

Nothing I do puts a dent in the speed.
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I've tinkered around the idea of getting a new motherboard or processor but to upgrade my current system to a 32gb ram what would I be looking at doing?
 
I'm still curious about the need for 32GB.

Upgrading your current system with more RAM wouldn't make a jot of difference.

If you're looking at building your own laptop then you're in the land of Clevo white-box chassis with motherboard already pre-assembled, and then buying in memory, CPU, etc. Good look finding someone who'll sell you a barebones chassis and compared to most proper laptops they're not that great IMO.
 
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Thorburn said:
What are you using for editing?

You'll often see better performance investing in a machine with a decent CPU and potentially GPU for video work than getting something low-end and packed out with memory.
Click to expand...

Oops didn't see this.

My CPU is decent but video editing takes up a lot of memory and eats through mine like nobodies business.

I really need more RAM, quad core will go with that territory I imagine anyway.
 
Phil Young said:
...do you edit HD video?
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Yes, a lot of it.

Mostly captured from PCs at 1080p 60Hz via a Blackmagic DeckLink Extreme 3D capture card, but the machine is specced for 2K captures.

You say your current CPU is 'decent' but a 2.3GHz 'duo core' (Core 2 Duo I assume?) is very slow by current standards. A current Celeron will outpace it.

You'll be surprised how little different you see adding in memory. Workstation at work has 32GB DDR3, but that's more for running multiple Virtual Machines for software testing than for the video side of things and is paired up with 2 x 8-core 3.1GHz Xeons.
 
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Phil Young said:
I've tinkered around the idea of getting a new motherboard or processor but to upgrade my current system to a 32gb ram what would I be looking at doing?
Click to expand...

Without knowing the details, i can only guess but i would think yours is not upgradeable to that extent, you would be looking at new motherboard to take the new RAM, its been a while but i assume motherboards are still ram specific, ie the speed of the ram you can have is dependent on the motherboard.

Im definitely agreeing that i cant see any reason why you would need 32g ?

Unless your thinking of the performance of the old 333/600mhz Ram ? last time i looked you could get 1060/1333mhz but i assume that is way higher by now.

I think 8-16g high speed Ram paired with something like 3.2 i5 or similar

And a high end graphics card.

Can i ask why not a PC/desktop, would get laods more bang for buck ?

Or if you can just add some RAM and see what happens, its fairly cheap/ how many slots do you have ??

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Kingsto...bolsp-app03-18?id=1218404812331&skuId=2129381
 
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scott199 said:
Without knowing the details, i can only guess but i would think yours is not upgradeable to that extent, you would be looking at new motherboard to take the new RAM, its been a while but i assume motherboards are still ram specific, ie the speed of the ram you can have is dependent on the motherboard.

Im definitely agreeing that i cant see any reason why you would need 32g ?

Unless your thinking of the performance of the old 333/600mhz Ram ? last time i looked you could get 1060/1333mhz but i assume that is way higher by now.

I think 8-16g high speed Ram paired with something like 3.2 i5 or similar

And a high end graphics card.

Can i ask why not a PC/desktop, would get laods more bang for buck ?

Or if you can just add some RAM and see what happens, its fairly cheap/ how many slots do you have ??

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Kingston+Technology+-+4GB+PC3-8500+DDR3+SoDIMM+Laptop+Memory/2129381.p;jsessionid=99545B023D5E527529C840784C155AEF.bbolsp-app03-18?id=1218404812331&skuId=2129381
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Eeesh this is so complicated haha.

All I want to do is edit video without having to render for it to flow smoothly. I assume it is ram that I need but if it's processing power then so very it, I need a new processor!

PC is a no go - I'm always mobile and have nowhere to put a PC.
 
Just as it's hard to offer really good advice without knowing - what applications are you using, and what kind of work are you doing (cutting down video clips and editing them together, special effects, compositing, etc)?

How do you like to use the system? As a stand-alone laptop or with a separate screen?
 
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Phil Young said:
Eeesh this is so complicated haha.

All I want to do is edit video without having to render for it to flow smoothly. I assume it is ram that I need but if it's processing power then so very it, I need a new processor!

PC is a no go - I'm always mobile and have nowhere to put a PC.
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lol if only it was that simple :P

Its a combination of 4 things really, Processor, Ram, graphics card and software.(and lots of other little bits :P )

My honest advice, find a small local comp shop, take it in and ask, explain what you want to do and you cant afford to buy new (even if you can), ask what would be best to upgrade (if poss)
 
scott199 said:
My honest advice, find a small local comp shop, take it in and ask, explain what you want to do and you cant afford to buy new (even if you can), ask what would be best to upgrade (if poss)
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Upgrading an old laptop there won't be any good upgrades - particularly if it's Core 2 based. They'll either try and sell you something that'll provide little or no improvement, or say they can't help.
 
scott199 said:
lol if only it was that simple :P

Its a combination of 4 things really, Processor, Ram, graphics card and software.(and lots of other little bits :P )

My honest advice, find a small local comp shop, take it in and ask, explain what you want to do and you cant afford to buy new (even if you can), ask what would be best to upgrade (if poss)
Click to expand...

I think that's best...
 
Why pay for dubious advice and ignore someone trying to help out for free?
 
Most small comp shops wont change. They would be able to tell you from your mother board if you can do anything.

It could be a simple as only one core running, or RAM kept in reserve and not being used on that software.

You may need someone to tell the comp to use 100% on that program.

My alienware has the same as my office comp, but is lightning fast compared as it's configured to push everything to their Max.
 
scott199 said:
Most small comp shops wont change. They would be able to tell you from your mother board if you can do anything.

It could be a simple as only one core running, or RAM kept in reserve and not being used on that software.

You may need someone to tell the comp to use 100% on that program.

My alienware has the same as my office comp, but is lightning fast compared as it's configured to push everything to their Max.
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The Alienware won't have anything configured different in the software. At a push it might have some slightly more aggressive ram timings in the bios. Otherwise if its the exact same spec in theory it should run the same.
 
neil_g said:
The Alienware won't have anything configured different in the software. At a push it might have some slightly more aggressive ram timings in the bios. Otherwise if its the exact same spec in theory it should run the same.
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Sometimes they'll seem more responsive as they pre-load less junk - having 100 processes loading in at login is the killer as they all go and thrash the hard drive at the same time and mechanical drives are hopeless when it comes to dealing with multiple requests concurrently as the system spends all it's time stalled waiting for the spinning platter to reach the read head (slow) and can never in to sequential reads (fast).

I've never found Alienware builds to be particularly 'clean' though, certainly not since Dell bought them.
 
Doesn't pre-rendering video footage during the editing process require a fair chunk of Ram?
 
Thorburn said:
Sometimes they'll seem more responsive as they pre-load less junk - having 100 processes loading in at login is the killer as they all go and thrash the hard drive at the same time and mechanical drives are hopeless when it comes to dealing with multiple requests concurrently as the system spends all it's time stalled waiting for the spinning platter to reach the read head (slow) and can never in to sequential reads (fast).

I've never found Alienware builds to be particularly 'clean' though, certainly not since Dell bought them.
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Yep agreed, my first alienware was so much better than my Dellaware.
 
You don't need 32GB of RAM unless you're running several VM's, rendering some 3D, rendering some video and playing a game to pass the time. For £2000 you could build a beast of a desktop for £1.2k and then buy a new laptop if you need portability, just offload the heavier jobs onto the desktop when you need to.
 
Thorburn said:
Sometimes they'll seem more responsive as they pre-load less junk - having 100 processes loading in at login is the killer as they all go and thrash the hard drive at the same time and mechanical drives are hopeless when it comes to dealing with multiple requests concurrently as the system spends all it's time stalled waiting for the spinning platter to reach the read head (slow) and can never in to sequential reads (fast).

I've never found Alienware builds to be particularly 'clean' though, certainly not since Dell bought them.
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But then that's not a hardware issue.. Run one of those de-crPifier tools and off you go. It's not worth the premium just because people are lazy to do a clean install or tidy it up.. ;)
 
neil_g said:
But then that's not a hardware issue.. Run one of those de-crPifier tools and off you go. It's not worth the premium just because people are lazy to do a clean install or tidy it up.. ;)
Click to expand...

I wasn't saying it was - I don't tend to use the out of the box Windows install anyway. ;)
 
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