Buying a Laptop - which vid card for premier?
 

Hello,

so I am looking at buying a laptop and I have a few narrowed down. The difficult thing I find is finding a laptop with either a firewire or express card port.

I am planning on using the adobe premier cs4 production suite. I have been told I should only get a laptop with nvidia cards, and stay away from ATI. Is it true that premier does not take advantage of ATI?

At the moment, ATI vs Nvidia does not make a difference. However, hopefully with CS5, Adobe will implement Nvidia's CUDA better which would speed up playback and rendering. I did see a video over on fxguide.com showcasing a desktop PC with Premiere and an nvidia card. They had 5 full 4k R3d layers playing in real time. Right now, I don't think Premiere can play back one 4k R3D layer in real time; so, this should mean that Adobe has something good for us in CS5.

All the 15" and up Dell and HP laptops I have seen include an Expresscard slot and firewire. However, most only have a 4 pin firewire (which can't supply power) and an Expresscard 34 slot instead of the bigger 54 (most cards are 34 so it almost doesn't matter). I have been checking the HP and Dell coupon deals lately and HP has some great deals on their new i7 quad-core laptops. I have seen their 18.4" with i7 920m for $1100.

I have a Sager laptop. Been editing in CS4 now with no problems. It has a CUDA supported video card. I have a dual core and can actually upgrade the processor to a quad on my own. Not many laptops offer that ability. These were originally designed for gamers but have read that video and audio editors have been taking advantage of these laptops. Check them out.