Is the Asus ZenBook UX501VW-DS71T a good laptop for After Effects?

[gunfinger13]

Considering this machine for After Effects and Video Editing.

Specs:

ASUS Zenbook Pro UX501VW-DS71T 15.6" IPS 4K UHD (38402160), glossy ,

Intel Quad Core i7-6700HQ 2.6GHz (Turbo up to 3.5GHz),

16GB DDR4, 512GB SSD PCIEx4 + TPM,

Nvidia GTX 960M 2G, 802.11AC,

Bluetooth 4.0, Windows 10 (64bit) 

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

---

[Dave_LaRonde]

What KIND of video will you be editing?  If it's 4K, it's a dog.

[Rick Gerard]

It all depends on what you are going to do with it. It's probably reasonable for amateur or occasional use but would fall short as a professional tool intended to produce complex projects in a reasonable amount of time. An AE pro would probably spend at least twice that amount on a laptop they expected to use in daily production and get more memory, better processors and a little better graphics card (not necessarily of much value to After Effects right now but probably would be a factor in future releases and the GPU is fairly important to Premiere Pro). If you have the time and are not constantly pushing deadlines it would probably do a fairly good job.

[gunfinger13]

The professional video editing I do at a production company on a machine provided by the company, I'll use this for side jobs, teasers and casting reels (not 4k). However the after effects will be more professional... could you provide a recommendation for a more appropriate machine? 4K and touch display are not necessary.

And thanks for your reply!

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Check the system requirements for Premiere Pro, that's where AE is headed, and find one that will take at least 32GB ram and has SSD or at least fusion internal drive capacity of at least 1 TB. Then look carefully at the warranty and check out the reviews of their customer service. I once spent nearly $6000 for a Windows hot rod video production laptop and it lasted precisely 14 months before it died completely due to major component failure. IOW the CPU and most of the controller chips built into the board failed catastrophically with the accompanying black smoke, stink, flash and small explosion. The company that made it said sorry about that, we'll sell you another one, we've improved the cooling and changed the design. I said no thanks.

For me Customer Service and warranty are the number one and number two considerations for any laptop purchase. I have not bought a windows laptop in several years because I have not found any manufacturer that I cared to deal with, but I have friends that are very happy with their HP and Dell products. I don't know any pros that are using other brands on a long term basis, but then again I'm not really shopping for windows laptops now. I'm sure there are some PC users out there that have their opinions on service and reliability.

[gunfinger13]

Thanks! Great advice, I'll continue researching.