17" Single drive laptop

• W170HR Optimus II Sandybridge Laptop 1920x1080 screen. 2GB nVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M, Expandable memory up to 8GB. Space for 1 HD and 1 Optical drive. 2 x USB2, 2 x USB3, 1 x eSATA. 1 x HDMI 1.4a, 1 x VGA. 9 in 1 card reader. Gbit LAN
• 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz SODIMMS
• Intel Core i7 2760QM / 2.4 GHz L3 6MB Cache (Quad core with Hyperthreading) Max Turbo Speed 3.5Ghz
• 500GB 7200rpm notebook drive
• Bag for 17" Laptop
• PowerDVD BD Edition For Laptop Blu-ray Writer
• Blu-ray writer for laptop
• Wireless N/Blutooth module
• Nero 10 essentials - CD and Data DVD writing software for your PC
• Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
  
• Optical wheel Mouse

This laptop has a Sandybridge processor and can accelerate encoding out of EDIUS using INTEL QUICKSYNC.  This means that we can get 1 hour HD video encoded into the right format for Blu-ray in about ½ hour.

What is the difference between this laptop and the more expensiveSANDYBRIDGE laptop?

NO FIREWIRE

Our other SANDYBRIDGE LAPTOP has a proper FireWire socket built-in.  This means you can capture and record back to tape using DV or HDV.  This laptop does not have a FireWire built-in and because it does not have an EXPRESS CARD slot (something that is very common in modern laptops) there is no way to add a FireWire socket.  If you are using DV or HDV DO NOT BUY THIS LAPTOP.  This laptop is very good for card-based footage or anything you transfer using a USB socket or card reader.  You can use DV or HDV footage on it, but you would have to capture it using a different computer and then copy it on to this machine

GRAPHIC CARD

Our other SANDYBRIDGE laptop has a very powerful nVidia graphic card built-in which is great for programs which use the graphic card (such as Premiere Pro, Photoshop, After Effects and many 3D programs).  This laptop has the option of using either a simple nVidia card or using the card which is built into the INTEL SANDYBRIDGE processor.  Grass Valley EDIUS can useINTEL QUICKSYNC for fast encoding into H264 formats for Blu-ray and MP4 files which uses the SANDYBRIDGE graphic card, and this works with this laptop.  Our other laptop, using the nice nVidia card, cannot access the SANDYBRIDGE for fast h264 encoding, which means this laptop will encode to H264 in EDIUS faster than the more expensive one!  

A good example of this is a large 4 hour project we were encoding on our desktop i7 system. The desktop has a 3.2Ghz i7 processors and is about a year old. It does not have a Sandybridge desktop processor so does not have Intel Quick Sync. EDIUS took over 12 hours to encode the 4 hour project.

We copied the media files to the laptop over our gigabyte network - the original AVIs were about 80GB but it copied in about 30 minutes. We then set the laptop encoding and the same project took 1½ hours to encode. Even with the extra time to copy the media to the laptop (which we could have avoided by editing off an external USB3 hard drive) it was significantly faster to encode using the laptop instead of the desktop.

In this case it was also a life saver because we realised we had made an error on the disc so had to fix that an re-encode. EDIUS always re-encodes everything so that meant another 12 hours on the desktop, or the job finished on the day in 90 minutes on the laptop!

This makes no difference when using Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid, however, as they do not use the Intel QUICKSYNC.

HARD DRIVES

The more expensive SANDYBRIDGE laptop can have two hard drives and a CD ROM/Blu-ray writer, this model can only have 1 hard drive and an optical driver or two hard drives, with one in bay replacing the optical drive.

RAM

This laptop can only take two RAM sticks which means the maximum amount or RAM you can have is 8GB.  The more expensive laptop can take 4 sticks of RAM, meaning you can have 16GB RAM. 8GB RAM is fine for most programs anyway and a 32bit program like Grass Valley EDIUS will not take advantage of more RAM even if you have it. 64bit Premiere Pro will use the extra RAM you can install on our other laptop although we have edited using Adobe Premiere Pro very successfully on this machine.

EXTERNAL VIDEO DEVICES

Neither laptop has an EXPRESS CARD socket so they do not work with Matrox or AJA devices like the Matrox MX02 or AJA I/O express.  Both have USB3 sockets but this low cost laptop has a different chipset USB3 socket which currently will not work with the Black Magic USB3 devices, the ULTRA STUDIO PRO and the INTENSITY SHUTTLE. So you cannot add an extra video device to the low cost laptop but you can add one to the dual hard drive laptop.

WHAT DO THE TWO LAPTOPS HAVE IN COMMON?

They both use the same types of processors, RAM, hard drive, can both have DVD or Blu-ray writer, and have USB2, USB3 and eSATA connections.