Question Need advice on laptop for basic graphic design / video editing.

[PC Tailor]

Hi all! I have a colleague of mine who needs a new laptop and was looking for recommendations, so thought I would open it to the community:

Budget Range: Approximately £500/£600 (but happy for you to suggest expectations).

Main System Usage:

• Adobe creative cloud applications (Illustrator and Photoshop mainly).
• Basic photo / video editing (potential)
• Microsoft applications
• Streaming music / videos (Spotify / Netflix )

It will NOT be used for gaming or advanced video/photo editing.

Country: UK

Preferences: "Ideally I would like a nice looking laptop, good build quality and a nice screen, good colour, quality and size."

When I explained workstation vs gaming GPUs, he did not seem to think that a workstation GPU would be required for his needs as it would not be incredibly detailed graphic design. I also started leaning him towards AMD Ryzen models as opposed to intel currently for the price and his usage, but I'm open to all recommendations as there are others who know better about the software requirements than me.

I also stated I think for his requirements, his budget may be a bit low for new computers.

He is also happy to look for refurbished laptops to bring the price down.

Any recommendations welcome!

 

[Cjhmitch]

Hey!

Personally I use a MacBook Pro 15 inch with touchpad and do tons of photoshop, illustrator and some premiere work. Obviously this is out of his price range, but I did some looking and something like the ASUS UX331UA-AS51or the Acer Aspire E 15 Laptop. I go for Macs because of their screen quality and my familiarity with them over the years.

As for specs, really you want to be looking for the best processor possible, especially for video editing. I've worked with plenty of Macs that only used integrated graphics and they lasted for years.

For reference, the specs on my mac are an i7 six core processor at 2.6 ghz (Coffee Lake), 16gb of 2400 DDR4, Radeon Pro 560x 4gb GDDR5.

Hopefully this helps! Let me know if I can give any more info.

 

[PC Tailor]

Thanks for the response my friend.

I think their budget is a little more constrained, so they will probably be going down integrated GPU route, especially considering a lot of the laptops that are usually recommended are significantly more expensive in the UK than in the US. For example the Acer Aspire is >£1100.

I showed him some Yoga flip pads and he seems to like the malleable and touchscreen idea, so potentially considering a beefier X360 Pavillion. He has said his graphic design is mostly basic graphics and vectors etc, so I'm suspecting it shouldn't be too demanding on GPU, and instead told him to focus on high core / high thread CPU.