W530 Video editing capabilities

Hi newbie here, please can you help. I have a couple of questions regarding the W530.

I have been considering the 3720qm, W530 with k2000m or the i7 non retina macbook pro for some video editing and much photo editing, but no gaming. I plan to upgrade the ram and install a decent ssd in which ever I choose.

1. Specifically for video editing how well does the W530 perform?
2. With the k2000m how does it compare to video editing on a macbook pro with the 650m?

3. I have noticed the option that Lenovo gives you for installing a 32gb msata SSD. If I was to buy a Samsung 830 SSD, is there any point in installing an msata SSD?

Many thanks,

D.

 

1. "how well" depends on a reference point. Video encoding on a laptop is not performing well, compared to a reasonable single or dual CPU workstation.

However, as far as laptops go, if you'd want noticeably higher performance than W530, you'd have to go to Dell / HP 17" mobile workstations, where K3000/K4000/K5000M GPUs are offered.

2. Performance depends on application. Check the application you're planning to use whether it's going to use CUDA for encoding.

Both 650m and k2000m have 384 CUDA cores, so performance differences are likely to be negligible. W530, if the app used manages to load both GPU and CPU 100%, will not throttle them down and will provide adequate cooling.

Also, if you're planning to actually use the laptop screen, W530 has 1920x1080 screen option, which lets you view the video in full resolution.

For photo-editing, unless you're processing very large images with specific filters, or run thousands of them through identical processing (e.g. timelapses), the difference between two modern GPUs is negligible. If the images are huge, W530 you can stuff with 32GB RAM, which maybe or may not be helpful, depending on the app and workflow.

3. No, there is no point.

 

The only concern with the macbook pro retina 15 is the RAM size and the throttling issue when the CPU and GPU are pushed. The cooling on Macbook/Pro isn't their strong suites.

 

The 650M is not officially supported by the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere which is one of the most popular video editing suites, on the other hand Nvidia Quadro cards and drivers are. You can perform a hack on the Premiere config file to enable support for some Geforce cards but I imagine Qudaro drivers will perform better. Hence I think the K2000M should perform at least as well as the 650M on programs like Adobe Premiere.

Video Encoding is actually very good on one of the latest high-end QM mobile CPU's, not sure where power7 gets his info that they don't compare well to "a reasonable single or dual CPU workstation" because if you look at the video encoding benchmarks such as: x264 HD Benchmark 5.0 - Page 2 - Tech ARP Forums

They compare very well, a i7-3720qm does better than a workstation with a quad core i5-2400 or i7-930 and is not that far of a i7-2600k which is still considered a very decent CPU. In other words if you get one of the top end mobile CPU's, which are available on the W530 i.e a i7-3820QM you will have no problems getting good video encoding performance that is very comparable to current mid range workstations. - I am only talking CPU performance.

If you are talking GPU aided encoding, again the intel HD4000 integrated GPU actually does better at encoding on a number of programs than both the Nvidia CUDA and ATi solutions. In other words you should have no problems getting very decent encoding performance out of a well speced W530.

 

If you need a portable solution, the W530 should be a good one. I have used my W510 in the field for years and it routinely handles encoding jobs (1-2 hour duration) with no issues. I have not put a W530 through those paces, but I have no doubt it will run circles around my W510. I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum for the video work I do.

I do prefer using the workstation under my desk when not traveling. It simply cools better and I have more storage.

But I can't carry the workstation in my backpack.

 

I would have to agree with the W530. It offers better cooling, high resolution screen options (even an IPS high color gamut display if you so wish, for photo editing), and also arguably better build quality. Although the MBP may be smaller and lighter, the W530 is still very portable at ~2.8kg.

The performance of the two machines should be roughly the same, since the K2000M is very similar to the GT650M.

 

The difference shows up when apples are compared to apples: current workstations (e.g. Dell T7600 etc) don't use old desktop CPUs, like i930 or i5-2400. There is a huge difference in CPU performance alone (a workstation can be stuffed with up to 2 x 8 core Xeons nowadays), and GPU performance available is just in another league.

But, portability requires sacrifices.

 

The W530 does offer a very good FHD LCD, but it is not IPS.

 

This is worth repeating. Both encoding and decoding.

Intel integrated graphics has become respectable since the HD 3000.

 

I would hardly call Sandy Bridge CPU architecture old and that is what the i5-2400 and i7-2600 are based on. Sandy bridge is very close performance wise to the current generation Ivy Bridge CPU's, Ivy Bridge is just the tick (primarily die shrink) of Sandy Bridge, Haswell will be the tock and that will bring a whole new architecture, so I am not really comparing old CPU architecture.

Even if I use your example of a Dell T7600, if you buy the factory speced $1962 version which comes with a Xeon E2609, a current 4 core CPU, it actually performs worse in CPU benchmark like PassMark than the two "older" CPU's I listed. So even if I do compare apples for apples which would mean comparing a system of a similar price point, the mobile CPU's don't stack up badly at all.

Sure if we compare a $1800 mobile workstation to a $4000 workstation, it's going to get destroyed but that is not a fair or useful comparison.

A more meaningful comparison would be to compare the video encoding performance of the W530 to what a average home user is currently using, that is what I did.

Can you build a quicker video encoding desktop system for 2k than a 2k W530, the answer is yes, however todays high powered mobile quad core CPU's don't compare badly to your average desktop CPU and are more than powerful enough to do a good job of encoding video quickly. Especially if you are using software designed to work with intel's HD4000 GPU.

It often depends on what software package you are using and what it is optimized for.

Even so I am interested to see how intel's HD4000 GPU solution stacks up against higher end Nvidia/ATi GPU products when it comes to video encoding. So far from what I have seen the intel solution is quicker at video encoding on the same settings than Nvidia GPU's that are many times more powerful than it in the video game department. My intel HD4000 smokes my K2000M when it comes to encoding video to H264 even though my K2000M is a much more powerful video card.

Edit:

Couldn't agree more, hence why I mentioned the above. Intels HD4000 GPU solution is giving the big boys a very good run for their money when it comes to encoding/decoding. It will be very interesting to see what Haswell brings in terms of integrated GPU performance. It just goes to reinforce my original statement that when it comes to video encoding performance todays mobile GPU's are a very viable option especially if the software is taking advantage of Intel's solution.

 

The point I was trying to made was very simple. It's all about a reference point.

If best performance for video editing/processing (where encoding to x264 isn't necessarily the most time consuming part), or other computation-intensive, especially GPU-computations intensive, workflow, a decent modern non-mobile workstation is much faster than any laptop. Especially dual CPU workstation. If this is "performing well", any laptop, including W530, will be somewhere from "poor" to "bearable".

If "performing well" is a 2-3 years old desktop with quadcore, and GPU performance is ignored (e.g. if not, or poorly supported by the software, like in consumer versions of Sony Vegas etc.), W530 will do very well.

Discussion about prices etc. is completely separate.

Intel QuickSync is an interesting technology, but its primary use is trans-coding when quality is not a concern, like converting video for mobile devices as fast as possible (when using software that supports it, which is currently just a few titles). For video editing it's not so important, as even a laptop CPU-only can x.264 encode 1080p/30 in real time in preview quality. CUDA processing makes a big difference in accelerating filters.

 

Right.

Right.

I appreciate it when people go straight to the heart of the matter.

(By the way, when you do video encoding, you don't care about IPS.)

 

My comments were in bases to your original comment above. On those grounds I still believe the W530 with i7 QM CPU does well vs modern desktop CPU's, least in the encoding/decoding area which is what I was referring to.

If we move on to talking about video rendering, filters/special effects etc, using professional software that is optimized for multi threading... Yes, in that case a high end multi CPU workstation will destroy any laptop in overall performance. However, when asking how well the W530 handles video, I don't think the OP was trying to compare it to a professional video editing workstation.

Most people who need or frequently use professional video processing equipment know that no laptop is going to handle video editing/rendering at performance levels equal to a professional grade workstation, hence I think it's safe to assume that no one here is expecting that.

I think you were thinking more along the lines of content creation and editing, where like you said, encoding is not necessarily the most time consuming part of the processes. On the video encoding/decoding front, modern high-end mobile CPU's do well vs their desktop counterparts.

 

edit: nevermind. didn't read carefully.

 

Thought I'd chime in since I also edit videos and photos on my W530. I have the 3720qm, K2000m, 840 Pro 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, and 32GB RAM (overkill, but it was too cheap on Cyber Monday to pass up). For video and photo I shoot with a hacked Panasonic GH2, which can churn out 100Mbps video. For reference, a 16GB SD card holds about 23 minutes of video.

I know the Windows WEI isn't the best metric, but here are my scores anyway:


If you're using Premiere Pro, you want to install this: Page 2 for Adobe Premiere CS6, CS5 and CS5.5 Video Cards by David Knarr so you can use the Mercury Playback Engine. I've found rendering performance to be quite good. It's fast and the files I work with are larger than normal.

I also use Lightroom for photos, and the W530 runs it no sweat.

I highly recommend using an external color calibrator, such as a ColorMunki Display. I got one over the holidays for about $120 (after rebate). You get more calibration options, in addition to being able to calibrate other monitors. The nice thing about the ColorMunki is that you can install the software on any Windows PC as much as you'd like. No BS activation stuff to deal with for multiple installs.

I'm still pretty surprised at how capable this machine is. It truly is a desktop replacement. If there's ever a fire in my home and I have time to grab a few things, the W530 would probably be my #1 or #2 priority

 

Get a fast CPU, and a lot of after market RAM (because Lenovo will rip you off, same with SSD).
I rendered my recent project in After Effects with my W530 (see sig below). It was not really slow, but faster would be better.
GPU does not "really" affect the rendering process.
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/55868151" width='500' height="281" frameborder='0' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

Snow Globe NYC from Long P Vo on Vimeo.

 

Many thanks to all you guys, you have been a great help.

 

I find this statement to be very interesting.

I use Adobe CS6. It's Mercury Engine works with nVidia GTX cards. Are you saying there is something similar for the Intel HD4000?

 

To merely recode video to certain popular standard formats, and fast, there is Intel Quick Sync Video - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .

 

Like power7 said. The Intel HD4000 uses Quick Sync which makes it very fast at encoding/decoding video to popular formats, faster than many of the ATi/CUDA solutions. For example, it is much faster than my Nvidia Quadro K2000M in this area.

However, remember that I am talking encoding/decoding of video not rendering special effects or applying filters in Adobe Premier/After Effects, that is different. In that area the Nvidia CUDA solution is the way to go.

How long will it take Intel to catch-up... not sure but if you look at how quickly they are advancing... the new GT3 intergraded GPU which is being released with Haswell is said to be almost on par with 650M performance, time will tell if those claims are accurate but for encoding/decoding of video the intel HD4000 is a good solution.