I just bought a Lenovo W701 I7 1.7ghz 12 gig ram 2 x 500gig hdd and a FX2800M. I loaded the hack and it seems to work, i am busy changing HDD (500 gig 7200 Seagate XT momentus for OS). I bought it used but in good condition.

Darren

I would check techbargains.com (or a similar site) regularly for "sandy bridge i7" and see what comes up.  For example, this was posted 2 days ago so it isn't currently active, but if you can stretch just a bit, deals like this are available. 

I know this is still far from ideal, but this would probably get you started (with some adjustments).  However, if you have this as a base system, you know the investment isn't wasted, because this system should scale up without much hassle.  Adding an eSata RAID0 drive and potentially a RAM upgrade should put you in pretty good shape I would think.

Keep checking deal sites like techbargains and see what you come up with.

Can anyone tell me how these computers stack up

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230024

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220696R

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=34-115-987&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Page=3#scrollFullInfo

Hmmmm there is no way I can afford that computer.

Just getting a GT 540M does not give us enough detail to say if it will work to provide MPE Hardware Acceleration.  I looked at the nVidia site and the amount of video RAM (directly connected to the graphics chip) is up to the manufacturer of the laptop.  Unless it has 1 GB of dedicated video RAM it will not work for MPE even with the user addition to "cuda_supported_cards.txt" file.

Have you looked at our PPBM5 results benchmarks.  There are several notebook computers that have been tested.  Here is one that scored fairly well.  I suspect that it was more expensive than your target.  Click on this thin line to see the results

Message was edited by: Bill Gehrke

For under $800, yes that would be pretty crippled. You should be able to spend a bit more though and "get by" though.

See what you can find with:

- 8GB or 16GB of RAM

- quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU (i.e. i7-2630QM); quad-core with hyperthreading is VERY important for CS5 and the new 32nm Sandy Bridge technology allows for more processing power than the 45 nm technology does considering the somewhat limited cooling capabilities of a laptop (certainly compared w/ a desktop PC)

- minimum of two hard drives; preferably both internal, but an eSATA connected extrernal can be effective (USB2 or USB3 are not so hot for CS5)

- GTX 460M is a great laptop video processor; there may be others too

Whether you spend a little of a lot, note that a laptop that will run CS5 to edit 1080P will be large and heavy - a least this class of laptop typically has a killer display screen!

Harm recently did a nice write-up on what hardware you need for CS5 and considering different CODECS, see:

System requirements for Premiere Pro CS5

While CS5 will work with a lesser PC for standard definition video editing - like in the old days - tightly compressed high definition media is a whole lot more demanding.

Jim

Not sure of the costs in the US, but I bought a Dell Studio 1558 last year for about £700 GBP which has been all around the world with me.  It has an i5 and 500 mb 7200 rpm drive; 4 Gb memory expqndable to 8 Gb; i-link, hdmi and e-sata connections.

Admitedly, my mobile editing is non too involved, usually straight edits and captioning in CS5, but I also use it to take in direct camera feeds via On Location.  For that, I attach an e-sata Raid-0 drive.

I'm not sure about the card, but it won't be MPE ready in CS5.5.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/studio-1558/pd