Are Gaming Laptops Good for Video Editing?

If you’re about to splurge on a high end gaming laptop, but have a keen interest in video editing as well, one of the biggest questions on your mind is, are gaming laptops good for video editing? Short answer is that gaming laptops are powerful devices, and most of the best models can easily handle your video editing tasks such as trimming footage, adding transitions, and other fancy effects.

But before plunking down some serious amount of cash on a gaming or video editing laptop, it helps to understand the key features needed to perform both tasks seamlessly, so that you can buy the best laptop model for your needs.

Gaming Laptop Buying Guide

While a gaming desktop is a preferred choice for most gamers, gaming laptops are highly portable, allowing you to play games on the go. But there’s a little more to focus on when buying a gaming laptop compared to a gaming PC as the former is a whole computer that comes with the keyboard and display in one shell.

CPU (Central Processing Unit) and RAM

A laptop’s CPU is designed to handle everything about the game, except for graphics such as controlling its non-playable characters, and its physics calculations. Further, the CPU of a respective laptop also dictates its overall performance for other applications such as the browser, and other non-gaming applications.

When trying to decide on the best CPU for a gaming laptop, keep in mind that processors from the Intel stable are truly hard to beat. This is one of the reasons you probably won’t find many gaming laptops fitted with an AMD CPU. Intel offers a wide range of CPU models, but Core i5 is the slowest CPU model to consider for entry level gaming.

If you want to buy the best gaming laptop for video editing according to mass to class, and one that you won’t have to upgrade a few months down the road, a quad core i7 processor is highly recommended. When wading through the many CPU options, take note of the clock speed each offers, because higher numbers equate to faster speeds.

Getting to the RAM (Random Access Memory) of a gaming laptop, most PC games are memory intensive, so the recommended amount is eight GB at the least. However, stepping it up a few notches to 16 GB is even better, and ensures that you can play the most memory intense games without any lag.

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)

Not to be confused with the CPU, the GPU is often regarded as the heart of a gaming laptop, most notably because it is responsible for processing the gaming data, and delivering the images to its display. Since some games can be memory intense, you should buy a gaming laptop that offers discrete graphics.

To explain briefly, discreet graphics aren’t part of the CPU, but rather a separate chip attached to the system board. With regards to gaming, you should invest in a laptop that comes with a top of the line graphics card such as ones from Nvidia to handle taxing games. This will allow you to play games at the highest settings, without any hiccups for several years to come.

Hard Disk Space

Gaming titles are generally large files, hence they will need more storage space. Therefore, it is a good idea to buy a laptop with a bigger hard drive, somewhere between 500 GB and one TB capacity.

Resolution

If you have beautiful graphics and butter-smooth frame rates, you should also have a top notch display to match. In terms of resolution, the bare minimum to opt for in a gaming laptop is 1920 x 1080 resolution, because anything less will result in muddy graphics. But if you’d like to experience the striking colors, and details offered by video games, your best bet is to buy a gaming laptop with a QHD (2560 x 1440) or 4K (3840 x 2160) panel.

The choice between glossy and matte panels boils down to personal preference, but most gamers claim that the former offers vibrant colors. Additionally, there are some gaming laptops that come with touch screens, which work well for games such as Cut the Rope and Candy Crush.

Keyboards and Touch Pads

Since both peripherals are integrated into the design of a gaming laptop, it is a good idea to ensure that each provides the right level of comfort when playing video games. Some of the key aspects to check out are the depth of key travel (average is 1.5 and 2 millimeters), actuation (the amount of force when depressing the keys), and of course customized lighting for that cool effect when playing video games.

Audio

Even though most of the best gaming laptops do come with a great set of integrated speakers, most gamers tend to opt for a good quality pair of headphones to avoid disturbing those around them, and to enjoy the sound effects of the game as they were meant to be.