Best mobile system for running Premiere for $700

[Coreylehmanenterprises]

I'm looking at Dell series. Particularly the G3. What are your suggestions for $700. No snarky comments please.

-A Mobile Editor

[Peru Bob]

moved from Premiere Pro to Hardware Forum

[Peru Bob]

I was looking at the specs for the G3.  I don't see any option to increase the RAM from 8 GB.

What type of media will you be editing (file type and codec)?

Will you be using it on battery power?

[Coreylehmanenterprises]

Hi Peru,

I will use this system for adobe creative suite use. As well as video streaming. For video I will be ingesting RAW files and MOV files into premiere and rendering in Mp4 and possibly h265. I want to be able to enxode for streams smoothly and render out videos and playback footage extremely smoothly.

[RjL190365]

Those video formats are extremely hard on the processing power to begin with. Even at today's prices, $700 will not get you much, and may get you a system that falls short of Adobe's minimum system hardware requirements, especially on the amount of RAM and the number of separate disks. A typical laptop that sells for that low has only 8 GB of RAM (the absolute minimum that Adobe requires just to even run Premiere Pro at all), a lower-power CPU with four or fewer CPU physical cores, only integrated on-CPU graphics (no discrete GPU whatsoever) and only a single internal disk (either an extremely small-capacity SSD that barely holds the operating system and the system's preinstalled apps, or an HDD that's almost as slow as molasses). That typical low-end laptop will handle HD in a less-compressed MPEG-2 codec but may choke on even H.264 rendering, let alone H.265. In order to handle H.264 or H.265 smoothly, you will need to at least double that budget (to at least $1,500).

[Coreylehmanenterprises · Accepted solution]

No offense. But your knowledge is out of date. I found a great deal for 720. Mod you can close this

[RjL190365]

Ah, I did not look at the specific G3. At $720 you do get a 4-core, 8-thread i5 CPU and a lower-end GeForce GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti GPU. However, Dell does not currently sell any RAM upgrades for that laptop even though it has two DIMM slots. So, Dell will only sell that laptop with the bare minimum 8 GB of RAM (and in the case of that i5 G3, a single 8 GB DIMM running in single-channel mode), so it's up to you to add in additional RAM yourself.

In addition, 256 GB worth of internal storage is skimpy, especially since exported video files can take up tens, if not hundreds, of GB. I would recommend adding an external USB 3.1 SSD, which you can purchase separately.

[willengland]

Runs like a charm on my Dell 17" G3 3779 (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz ) - granted I pushed the RAM to the max (32GB) and boosted the M2 drive to a 500GB model.   Migrating that was a PITA from the 128 M2 that came with it. Also came with a 1TB SATA drive.   With the discount code last year the stock laptop was about $800 plus tax; over the last 6, 9 months I've done the RAM and M2 upgrades.  It'll run fine as it comes though.

BE AWARE: the G3 series is *not* a workstation or business class laptop.  Straight polycarbonate, no metal frame reinforcements.  Treat it like a case of eggs.

Renders are a bit slower than Final Cut Pro on my quad core Late 2015 MacBook Pro (just different software; FCP does background rendering and is done before you realize it).