Surface Book for recording gameplay, 1080p editing, audio recording

[alexblair]

I am looking for an inexpensive laptop that can handle 1080p editing in Adobe Premiere, Audio Recording in Audacity, and recording gameplay of my desktop. So when I found out the I could get a dGPU model Surface Book on amazon for less than $1500, I'm thrilled. Will this be good enough to handle my editing?

 

[alexblair]

https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Surface-NVIDIA-GeForce-graphics/dp/B0163GS05Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1478737444&sr=1-1&keywords=surface+book

 

[rhysiam]

The surface book is a nice piece of kit, but it's key selling points are ultra portability, and the tablet mode. Also, I don't know that anyone would ever use the word "inexpensive" to describe it.

Is the portability important to you? Because you made some significant sacrifices going thin and light, especially if video editing matters.

Just as a point of comparison, here's a mid-range "gaming" laptop for half the price: https://www.amazon.com/MSI-Generation-GeForce-GL62-6QF-628/dp/B01DT7IGRE/ref=sr_1_8?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1478737976&sr=1-8&keywords=gaming+laptop
It's got a much better graphics card and twice the CPU cores. Now, it looks like an adolescent's toy, weighs nearly twice as much, has atrocious battery life and the display pales in comparison to the beautiful 3:2 high res screen on the Surface Book. But in terms of a video editing workstation, it will be much more competent and costs half the price.

There are loads of similar units, I haven't really looked around. But you could probably get a 16GB i7 HQ unit for a little more, still less than the SB. You could probably find one with a more muted design too if that's your thing (and given that you're looking at the SB, I'm assuming it is).

It all depends what your priorities are.