Looking for video editing laptop

After Effects barely utilizes the GPU at all. It is almost entirely CPU- and RAM-intensive.

With that said, if you're going to run Premiere Pro, I would not currently recommend either of your two choices, for the following reasons:

1) Neither of those two laptops have any way at all whatsoever to disable the integrated Intel HD or UHD Graphics that's part of the CPU package, even if both of those laptops have a discrete GeForce GPU installed and enabled.

2) The current versions of Premiere Pro CC cannot have OpenCL GPU acceleration support disabled if CUDA GPU acceleration is enabled - in other words, your choices should have been labeled "OpenCL only", "Both" or "Neither". This means that Premiere will always use the integrated Intel graphics first before the discrete GPU kicks in, even if CUDA is enabled. The only way to defeat that currently is to set the renderer to the software-only mode, which slows all rendering operations down.

3) On top of those two problems above, the Surface Book 2 15" does not currently offer a 6-core CPU option. Only a single CPU choice - a quad-core i7-8650U - is available on that model.

Moved to the Hardware forum.

At this point sadly there is little point on relying on GPU features in AE. "Buggy as hell" would be putting it mildly, so you would find yourself reverting to CPU-only modes a lot, anyway or the effects and render pipelien fall back to that basic level themselves. Touch screen support is irrelevant for AE and since the Surface books use a different system than standard Wacom tablets, anyway, this isn't guaranteed to work reliably with otehr adobe apps, either. Check the Photoshop and illustrator forums for how problematic this can become. RAM is probably not the biggest concern. 16 GB is plenty for basic HD work. Things only get crazy once you move on to 4k and beyond. also of course VR work will require lots of RAM, but that also mandates a GPU, so you're kinda in a pinch on that one, given the situation. It really depends. If you have the funds, and 3.3 k is really quite a chunk of dough, I'd go with a more traditional notebook. they're less dependent on OEM, vendor-customized drivers so you might be able to fix issues easier e.g. with a generic nVidia graphics driver instead of waiting half a year for Microsoft to bring out their own signed and certified version for Surface Books.

Mylenium