Other will have other opinions:

That computer is more than enough for the consumer type user without the double video cards. My drives are all 5400 (for reliability).

What do you plan to do with that computer - do you run or are you a a PROfessional video company?

Time is money in that case. Do you work with a lot of long videos, with blu ray, etc? The memory will speed up rendering to a point. many people on this site believe that software encoding (rendering) give a better looking finished video . I don't see that.

Edit: Why a laptop - actually as desktop replacement. Are you going to be carrying it around a lot? You would be surprised how much 6-8 pounds weights after a while of toting it around !
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BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

I agree with Steve.

Don't sweat the 5400 rpm drive. It is a 1 TB mechanical drive which moves the read/write heads a lot less distance to read/write data than a smaller faster HD. You seriously will not notice the difference unless you are a gamer or benchmarker trying to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your machine.

That single 750M is more than good enough. Video editing is more CPU intensive than GPU- regardless of the marketing spin you read. Real world use- get the fastest CPU you can, the graphics card is just icing on the cake. (As far as stabillity with dual cards- I am personally not convinced at this point that it is as smooth and seamless as it should be when video editing and offers zero net benefit over a capable modern single card.)

The specs on that Lenovo Y510p looks very nice at the price point.

My only concern is that really small 24GB SSD. You will get Win8 on it and use the 1TB as your main data/prgm drive, but Windows and installed prgms on the data drive default to the main C: drive to do their background thing. Temp files etc. This can cause hiccups and unexplained glitches (noted by other users in the past when they played around with where their prgm data load/save files should go.)

So think about grabbing a larger SSD main C: drive in the future. Load all your prgms on that and use the 1TB as data and backup storage only.

R
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for the comments. I may get the additional TravelStar 7200rpm 1TB drive (they're just $75!) just to give me more general storage space (if not using dual video cards (which I think I won't), the Y510p can have 2 drives on-board). I'll probably swap out the 7200rpm drive as my C: and move the 5400rpm drive to the storage bay. That should provide the best mechanical drive speed I can get until I can afford a larger SSD. Will increasing memory to 16G add much benefit for PowerDirector? Really appreciate the help.

One other thing, has PowerDirector been pretty stable running under Win8? Has anyone seen any problems?

Sorry, a couple other answers to Steve's questions. I'm not currently doing any video work for profit but I may in the future. I'm working with lots of different formats and footage times including some 4K (primarily from GoPro Black). I'm also an EE & software developer, so I use my machine pretty heavily for the things I do & YES, saving a few seconds/minutes on whatever I do will provide benefit for me. I really want this new machine to be fairly capable since I don't want to have to purchase another for at least 2-4 years. I travel a lot and certainly need a laptop (weight is not an issue, my current laptop is a 6lb beast too and carrying it around lets me limit my gym visits!! ). Appreciate the help.

Quote: One other thing, has PowerDirector been pretty stable running under Win8? Has anyone seen any problems?

Not here, but I've done no heavy editing. In Windows 8.1 (preview) there was an easily solvable display problem, likely to be resolved when the final version is released.

Personally, I feel that 8G is enough, but 16G won't hurt.

For HD, you will want 60+GB on the c: drive, where the program is installed. Here are the general specs...
http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector-ultra/specs_en_US.html?&r=1

Hi SeaLyon99 ,
I agree with RobAC on the small size of the SSD - go for a a much larger one - minimum would be 250gb+ in my opinion. You'll need to check the read write speeds on the SSD's. Earlier smaller SSD's were a lot slower. Editing HD files are a lot faster with an SSD.
Dafydd

Well, the 24G SSD is a throw-in and I really don't want to purchase a larger SSD to start. But, if I did, how large of a performance benefit would a 256G SSD provide for PowerDirector? I'm assuming the idea would be to install the OS and PowerDirector on the SSD, correct? What SSD speeds would you recommend?

Hi,
You can install PD on another drive, but it would still require a lot of free space on the main drive C:\ it uses c: drive for backgound rendering and process' that is why 100GB free on C: drive a requirement.
Jim
p.s. a 250GB SSD drive with nothing but windows resources would work nice, but the larger the better.
Jim Intel i7-2600@3.4Gz Geforce 560ti-1GB Graphic accelerator, windows 7 Premium 12GB memory

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