Hi Kenneth -

It's important to know, at the outset, what sort of "larger" movies you'll be producing. SD? HD? It certainly would affect your choice... particularly if it's HD.

When I was upgrading my desktop, I asked around (as you are) & consulted a number of "benchmark" sites. I found them to be very useful & you may too.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

These are useful for comparing CPUs & GPUs. For example, with the cards, there's a SIGNIFICANT difference in performance of the GTS 360M & the GT 240M. With the processors, the i7 (didn't mention the model) might not outperform the Core2Duo P8800, with a processor speed of 1.6GHz.

Your choice will depend on what you want to do with it & budget but, since it's the time of the Winter Olympics, I'd keep the Olympic motto firmly in mind:

Citius, Altius, Fortius... Swifter, Higher, Stronger

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

Thanks, Tony for the quick feed back. That is a great site. I’m not sure how to interpret the numbers in the benchmark tests (I couldn’t find any explanation); but the i7 – 720QM was #12 on their list. The Core 2 Duo P8800 is #34 –down the list a little. I don’t know if you are rendering a movie that takes 3 hours on the slower processor if it will take 2 ¾ hours or 1 ½ hours on the faster machine (just to throughout some meaningless numbers). I don’t know how significant the difference is. I see the GTS360M video chip is in their class 1 and the other is in class 2. Do you have any feel for how significant the differences are in terms of rendering time, since that is the biggest time consumer? Thanks

Kenneth -

I'm glad you found it useful. It's difficult to give an answer without specific information and testing of render times... and, for us, that could be close to impossible.

Those sites have arrived at the information on their table by carrying out the same processing tests using each CPU & GPU. To be honest, I don't understand half the numbers either! I do understand that the ones at the top are better than the ones at the bottom!

I also understand that a strongly performing graphics card can seriously improve the performance of a system, so that CPU "a" with GPU "a" would outperform CPU "a" with GPU "b", if you see what I mean.

My Canon camera records at 24MBps (among others). Editing that, my previous desktop wouldn't have lasted long without giving up. My current laptop doesn't like it either, but it's happy if I record at 12MBps. The Corei7 desktop I'm sitting at now does whatever I want it to, happily! What I'm saying is - invest in a machine that will do what you want.

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

Tony, thanks for the input. Your laptop handles whatever you give it. If you were purchasing one today, would you get an i7-720 cpu with GeForce 360M (1GB) and about 6GB memory? Or do you feel anything should be upgraded? Does Power Director 8 take advantage of the multi threads and 4 cores when rendering? Thanks.

Kenneth -

My laptop, sadly, cannot handle anything I throw at it. In fact, I only rarely use it for editing... and then, only lightweight stuff. No - my desktop is my main editing machine, while my (much older) Mac sits forlornly beside it feeling completely left out.

Here are the basic specs. You can see why the desktop performs much better!!!

Desktop:
Win7 Home Premium (64-bit), Core i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz, 8MB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 (1259MB)

Laptop:
Vista Business(32-bit), Core2 Duo CPU @ 1.86GHz, 1MB RAM, GPU - Mobile Intel 945GM (224MB)

Both the laptops you're considering would chew mine up and spit it out!

Me? I'd choose (of those two), the i7 720 machine with the GeForce 360M... without hesitation!

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!