Laptop upgrade for After Effects

[MarekMularczyk]

Hello everyone,

I need some advice.

I'm thinking about upgrading, currently working on Surface Pro 7+ (Intel i7 11th Gen and 16GB of RAM) but the challenge is that they're really expensive. i love the Surface Pro and would want to stick to it.

My question is, what would make a difference in AE:

- upgrading from i7 11th gen (4 cores) to i7 12gen (up to 10 cores) (this means upgrading from Surface Pro 7+ to latest Surface Pro 9) (with 16GB of RAM)

or

- upgrading from 16GB of RAM to 32GB of RAM (the same Surface Pro 7+ with i7 11th gen).

(latest Surface Pro 9 with 32GB of RAM is too expensive)

Thanks,

Marek

[Ishan Y]

Hey Marek,

Could you let us know what type of projects you usually work on? Sharing the kind of source files, composition resolution, bit depth, effects, and number of layers you work with can give us a better idea of what you're working with. The recommended system specifications are eight or more cores with 32GB of ram. You can also check out this article by Puget Systems for hardware recommendations. I am moving this post to the Video Hardware community. The community experts can weigh in and give you more precise recommendations.

Thanks,

Ishan

[MarekMularczyk]

Thanks for reply, Ishan.

What I'm talking about here is primarily when I deliver AE courses over zoom, so my comps are all 1080p, most videos are 720p or 1080p, and they're normally 24-30fps. Number of layers would be up to 12 but normally anywhere between 3 and 10.

What puzzles me is that it was all fine up till about a month ago...

[Peru Bob]

---

@MarekMularczyk wrote:

What puzzles me is that it was all fine up till about a month ago...

---

How full are your hard drives?

[MarekMularczyk]

60GB space left

[Peru Bob]

That could be at least a contributing factor.

Try clearing some space.

[RjL190365]

If you can afford it, I'd recommend the model with 32 GB of RAM on account of the Surface Pro's complete lack of a discrete GPU with its own VRAM. You see, the integrated on-CPU-package Intel Iris Xe graphics steals a lot of system RAM for itself, making that amount of system RAM unavailable for computer program operations when GPGPU processing (OpenCL) is utilized. This can leave the 16 GB system with an insufficient amount of available system RAM to run After Effects properly, especially during rendering, and therefore causing the laptop to sputter and choke.