Im shopping for a new laptop or desktop for editing, specs?

Any advise on what yook out for?
i7 or above.
32gb ram or above.
1Tb drive or above.
Rtx 5070 or above.

Thoughts or variations?

@Eclipse_Droneography Minimum 16GB Ram, would also get a NAS Drive back up and to extend storage if you have the budget.

DaVinci Resolve is free and is feature packed (if you don’t already have any editing software).

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I recommend a desktop.
Your spec looks good. Budget for a good monitor, too.
If you plan to use it for commercial work, you might need to scale up.
My setup is for photography and I use 2 x 1TB NVME and an SSD just for current jobs, import backups and workflow. It’s barely enough, but it really pushed my budget when I got it. And the NVMEs have not come down in price much :frowning:
If you have an existing PC you could turn it into a NAS with TrueNas. This has been my image server for about six years now and it has been mostly flawlass. No data loss or breaches, but I have got locked out because of how complex networking is! Since then I’ve swapped up the drives a couple of times to keep up with demand. I buy used enterprise-grade drives from good sources, otherwisew they’d be too expensive.
Look at whether the software you use is best served by a multi-core CPU.
I’m not sure if an i7 will go for five years before you need to replace it. If you have an Adobe subscription, you will be ramping up your system demands quite steadily year after year.
Laptops are awesome, but I swear by PCs. Liquid cooling is worth looking at if it’s going to be in your sleeping room, it’s much quieter than even the quitest fans, and dusting is much simpler as the fans are in the top of the case and you don’t need to go inside to clean them.

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I’d agree with @GVG_Air a desktop is far more expandable, I built mine but never having built one, I soon discovered I needed to upgrade the GPU.
This is what I learned, not knowing the editing software hardware requirements was critical in deciding which path to take. I used my then Win 7 Pro Laptop which was reasonable for 720p in Sony Vegas but struggled with 1080p.

I upgraded to an Alienware Gaming Laptop which chewed through 1080p in a reasonable render time. Then came 4K which killed everything I had. I had to upgrade my editing software and my means of chewing 4K.

Enter the Dragon; I realised that everything hinged on a custom build and with that realisation, I started to research own PC builds. A friend had just stopped Crypto Mining so I offered to by one of his Graphics Cards an MSI 1080 Ti 11GB, and with it in hand It made sense to marry the GPU with the same manufacturers’ Motherboard an MSI 570 Ace.

I threw in a AMD Ryzen 12 core I think, the PC was now so much faster but the software was and is still demanding when you’re adding transitions and music while editing and playing back. Although I was able to edit 4K RAW at 1080p I found my colour correction was slightly off.

Not happy with the above setup, I upgraded the PC to it’s current spec which is the same Motherboard with an Nvida GeFroce RTX 3090Ti 24GB married to an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Core Processor and 16 TB storage and while at it 128GB RAM. (overkill on RAM ) :thinking:

Takeaway from all the above is if your budget allows consider the amount of RAM and go for the highest, in my case the 24GB of GPU Video memory for 4K. I was lucky to find a brand new GPU on eBay that was reduced from £1300 t0 £900 due to gaming moving from the 30 series cards to the 40 series.
I hope this sheds some light in your quest @Eclipse_Droneography

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Thanks for the advice. Ill start looking for a reasonable spec desktop, then ill have something to build on. :ok_hand:

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Agree with the Davinci Resolve recommendation above, as mentioned there’s a free version that isn’t too limited for basic use.

Personally I have the studio version (I edit professionally) and my daily driver is an M4 MacBook Pro (with M4 Pro and 48GB RAM). I use this for all my editing, always at least 4K, color graded and often with motion graphics or effects and it rarely struggles to keep up live playback.

Just my 2c.

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