With CS5 on the horizon, it's time for the periodic fork-in-the-road.

The hardware requirements for CS5 are steep, but it seems there will be a handful of laptops up to the task, especially if the 12gb RAM minimum is not a hard and fast need. Asus, BOXX, and HP are among laptop makers incorporating a CUDA version of Nvidia graphics card (the GTX 260M). No info if this card will power the Mercury playback of CS5 as of yet.

Conventional wisdom (at least with my limited knowledge) is that laptops are always a performance compromise and mostly non-upgradable. But the convenience and portability factor are tempting.

If for example, the new Asus with its 6gb of RAM and Nvidia graphics card were able to handle CS5 Premiere, would any of you make a move to laptop?

Will the on board HDMI port of these new generation laptops provide independent video monitoring?

Mitchell.... I know you have done some research on this, any thoughts?

Harm.... I know it's nearly midnight over there, but snap to.... we need answers!

Marty,

This article is nearly one year old, but in essence the info still holds. Adobe Forums: Contemplating a notebook for editing? (http://forums.adobe.com/message/1989795#1989795) . BTW my PassMark scores are now 6055 for my workstation and unchanged for my laptop.

Sure laptops have gained somewhat on workstations, with the new i7M CPU's, but the bottleneck remains the disk configuration. Personally I would use a laptop for OnLocation, but for editing I would only use a workstation.

The requirements for CS5 and what cards are supported is very nebulous, at least for MPE support and I would be hesitant to invest now when we don't have any tangible information from Adobe. I mean, suppose you were to invest in a nVidia 260 card and the entrance level for MPE would be 285? I would feel frustrated.

Sorry to keep you waiting, but I did not see your post until today. Must have been asleep.

Hey Marty, from what I've seen from the videos (from Dennis Radeke/Dave Helmly) for the Mercury playback engine, it potentially may need the powerful desktop nvidia GPUs versus the mobile GPUs. Time will tell though.

Hey Harm, are you still using the same Core i7 920 with the Areca sata RAID card and disk subsystems? What do you use to house all those drives? (I'm using a cheap $300 Norco DS-4220 case that houses 20 sata/sas drives - http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/canon-eos-5d-mk-ii-hd/466267-storage-how-you-handling-5d-files-2.html#post1437638 as a file server, and a separate box with a Core i7-920) Did you upgrade SATA disks to say 2TB disks, what has been your experience with Areca, as I know they are server class, but configuration is fairly invovled?

Also, you may have seen it already, but eVGA is soon to announce a dual LGA1366 enthusiast motherboard at CES 2010 in Las Vegas, which will finally bring overclocking to the Nehalem Xeons. BTW, I've seen tons of your posts on adobeforums, kudos.

I haven't had any experience with Areca, but I have had experience with Highpoint-Tech and LSI Logic. My 8 channel Highpoint-Tech has been amazing, I get around 400mb/sec with 4 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11s in RAID 5, in RAID 0 they got over 500mb/sec. They have a new 24 port RAID card out now that looks to be amazing. It was incredibly easy to setup and every now and then NewEgg will run sales on them, I got mine last Spring for 50% off during a sale.

Hey Harm, are you still using the same Core i7 920 with the Areca sata RAID card and disk subsystems? What do you use to house all those drives? (I'm using a cheap $300 Norco DS-4220 case that houses 20 sata/sas drives - http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/canon-eos-5d-mk-ii-hd/466267-storage-how-you-handling-5d-files-2.html#post1437638 as a file server, and a separate box with a Core i7-920) Did you upgrade SATA disks to say 2TB disks, what has been your experience with Areca, as I know they are server class, but configuration is fairly invovled?

Also, you may have seen it already, but eVGA is soon to announce a dual LGA1366 enthusiast motherboard at CES 2010 in Las Vegas, which will finally bring overclocking to the Nehalem Xeons. BTW, I've seen tons of your posts on adobeforums, kudos.

I am still using that system. I use the Lian Li PC-A77B case, where I can fit in 21 3.25" disks plus 2 BRD burners. Till now I only use a Velociraptor as a boot disk and 16 SATA 1TB disks, of which 12 in a raid30. That was very straightforward on the Areca. Just create two raid3 arrays and then configure these as a raid30. Of course formatting the array in Windows is time consuming, but that is the only disadvantage. Even replacing disks is easy. I had two disks that required exchanging under guarantee. Take a disk out, insert the new disk, define as hot-spare and then extend the array again and you are back in business.

BTW, your drive cage, the Norco looks very nice. Thanks for showing it.