New Kaby Lake i7-7700U dual core processors and PE15?

[jefflackey]

I've been waiting until CES announcements to decide what to replace my current computer with. Due to my extensive travel, my only computer these days is a laptop. My current laptop is several years old, but it is a behemouth: Alienware M17x that weighs about 10 pounds, gets so hot (quickly) it's tough to hold even with a pad, and has a battery life of about an hour which makes it worthless on a plane or in an airport with few outlets or on a long car trip.

I no longer play games on my laptop (all my gaming is on my PS4) so I mainly use it for Word (Excel, Word, PPT) and internet and work type "stuff" - I also use it to store all my music and movies for my Plex server (cast to Chromecasts.) The ONLY things that requires some decent power is video editing. I've been using Cyberlink Powerdirector for years, recently purchased PE15. But even with the video editing, my work flow is usually taking HD videos, 1080p or 720p (not 4K for now), editing them down to smaller pieces, then combining the smaller edited clips into a longer movie. I'll add a few simple titles and some simple crossfades. I typically save the result in a TV friendly 1080p or 720p MP4 at 29,97 FPS.

The question I have - I would LOVE to have one of the new ultrabooks, For travel having something so light and with 10+ hour batter life and not requiring a 150W powerbrick the size of my carry on bag would be heaven. But they typically have, at their high end, Kaby Lake i7-7700U type processors (usually with an Intel 620 GPU.)

Does anyone have any idea of whether these will work acceptably for the type of video editing I do with PE15? I don't think I'll have the luxury of trying one out, installing PE15 on it, and then trying it out before buying.

Thanks!

[Steve Grisetti]

In my experience, I've found that anything that rates above a 6000 on this benchmark chart will edit HD video easily in Premiere Elements.

PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End

The processor you're looking at rates over 10,000 -- so not only will it edit 1080p without working up a sweat, but you'll have no problems should you decide to move up to editing 4K!

[jefflackey]

Thanks but I'm afraid thats not the dual core "U" version. The i7-7500U on that charter is probably closer and just a bit slower than the new i7-7700U- and the i7-7500U is only 5200 on that chart. I assume 5200-5500 would be a problem?

[Steve Grisetti]

You can probably still edit AVCHD camcorder or smartphone on that computer with no problems, Jeff.

[jefflackey]

Steve, help me with my ignorance please. When you say AVCHD camcorder files, what does that include? And what does that not include? For example, sometimes I will create a birthday or going away party video and use, e.g. a DVD rip of a BluRay (say, edit a scene from The Princess Bride where the one guy is fencing, and make it look like he is talking to the person whose birthday it is by cutting in video of the birthday boy, then back to the Princess Bride guy talking, then back to him, etc.) Max resolution for the files I work with is 1080p, and they may be as short as 5 minutes and as long as, say, two hours.

Thanks

[Steve Grisetti]

I can't speak for video ripped from commercial DVDs and BluRays, Jeff, since the software used to rip copyrighted material often doesn't follow the regular rules.

But if you're just working with VOB files from DVDs, that processor won't even work up a sweat doing that.