I do wish the Toshiba had USB 3. Also, the 505-898 has two drives, the first is a 50GB SSD. Barely fits the OS and CS5. I have about 10G to spare there. The SSD is fast, though. (There's also the 500GB 7200RPM for media) The other annoyance was the multimedia touch-pad on the left of the keyboard- which I kept hitting by mistake until I disabled it. I needed the eSata, firewire and express card for XDCAM. The Toshiba is hefty, but the bigger screen is nice.

Quadro 5000M
 

Hi All,
We've just certified Premiere Pro CS5 to run on a mobile CUDA card, the NVIDIA Quadro 5000M. If you have this card, you should update to Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.3). Do so by following this link:

“Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.3) update: performance improvements, bug fixes and Quadro 5000M and 4000 CUDA support”

I've had a little over a week working with the HP EliteBook 8740w now and I'll tell ya, it is pretty fast. After installing Premiere Pro CS5 and adding the NVIDIA 3800M to the list of Cuda supported cards, the system has no problem handling the HDV mpeg-2 files from my Canon XH-A1s. I get good performance with up to 4 layers of video playing simultaneously on the timeline. It renders so much faster than my old machine it is laughable.

I haven't set up additional hard drives yet, but the two USB 3.0 ports should work nicely when I have the cash to invest.

Thanks to everyone for their input on this thread.

Ben, how's the 8740w going?

Re: Mercury Playback Engine and NVIDIA mobile cards
 

Just to add my two cents.

I recently got a new HP 8540w laptop from work and I thought I'd give PPro CS5 a test run.

Core i7-720CPU
16GB RAM
2 x 500GB 7200 RPM Hard Drives
nVidia FX880M video

And I was really impressed how fast it runs on a mobile platform. I had to do the trick to get CS5 to see the video card but that was simple.

The screen is way too small to do anything serious of course but in a pinch you would get by with it.

Charlie Durand