Archive republication: This technical review originally appeared in Digital Production 01:2020 and was republished online in June 2021. Hardware, software, pricing, compatibility and performance details reflect the historical test configuration.
This article originally appeared in DP 01 : 2020.
Basically, a laptop is not really enough if you want to work with high-resolution professional formats in DaVinci Resolve. A very well-equipped desktop computer in a trolley for the Digital Image Technician (DIT for short) has to be carted to the location if immediate grading and filtering tests are required. But new camera formats such as Blackmagic RAW and performance improvements in graphics cards give us hope that it can also be one or two sizes smaller and cheaper. We took a closer look at two possible solutions: a gaming laptop running Windows and a Mac mini with an external GPU.
If you try to configure a current 15-inch Macbook Pro for maximum performance, you will quickly end up paying well over 4,000 euros. The new 16-inch Macbook Pro was not yet available at the time of going to press. But only with the most expensive option can you finally get 8 Gbytes of VRAM in an Apple laptop, and in the age of UHD or 4K for Resolve, less is no longer up-to-date. You could also configure a very powerful desktop computer under Windows for the price, of course with 8 Gbytes of VRAM or even more.
The alternative is a cheaper Mac mini with the most powerful i7 CPU with 6 cores and 3.2 GHz, Thunderbolt 3 and an external GPU. It weighs just 1.3 kg and doesn’t need an external power supply. Last year, we tested the Blackmagic eGPU (tinyurl.com/BMD-egpu) and found that even the cheapest 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2017 was able to edit UHD material from semi-professional cameras in an HD timeline reasonably well. At that time, however, there was no processor-friendly Blackmagic RAW (BRAW for short), and with DNG sequences or The Mac mini can only be used sensibly for Resolve with an eGPU. even material from a RED, such a CPU had to admit defeat. The eGPUs from Blackmagic, distributed by Apple, are very quiet, but not exactly cheap and cannot be upgraded.
This time we looked around for an alternative and found it in the eGFX Breakaway Box from Sonnet. It is even available in several power levels for the power supply unit, the middle one can be found for around 330 euros, used for well under 200.
The box from Sonnet accepts full-size graphics cards, so you can make a reasonably future-proof investment. We used a normal PC version of the AMD Sapphire RX 580 with 8 Gbyte VRAM in the test, whose performance corresponds to the smaller eGPU from Apple. Although the eGPU from Sonnet only has one Thunderbolt port and no additional USB sockets, the graphics card offers two HDMI outputs and two display ports. It therefore also supports 5K monitors with up to 5,120 × 2,880 pixels and 60 Hz. The weight with this card is just under 4 kg, so the total weight is 5.3 kg. It is recognised on the Mac without additional drivers and – unlike the larger eGPU from Apple – automatically goes into sleep mode with the Mac.
The Aldi calculator
Medion, Aldi’s in-house electronics brand, occasionally offers inexpensive computers, including a typical gaming laptop under the name Erazer. The tested variant was sold in October 2019 and has the exact designation Erazer P17815. This model has a ninth-generation i7 CPU with 6 cores at 2.6 GHz and 16 GB of RAM. There is also a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti from Nvidia with 6 Gbytes of VRAM and an SSD with a whole Tbyte as mass storage. That’s a pretty solid configuration for 4K or UHD editing according to Blackmagic’s recommendations and yet it only costs €1,299. If Apple were still on good terms with Nvidia, you would certainly have to pay more than three times as much for comparable equipment in a laptop.
Despite the narrow edges of the 17-inch screen, this is a rather chunky device with a good 48cm diagonal, an average height of over 3cm (the casing is wedge-shaped) and a weight of 2.7kg with battery. The power supply unit including cable adds another 800 grams, and you need a generous laptop bag for the three and a half kilos. The workmanship is quite decent. At first glance, the keyboard shows a clear curvature in the centre, but this is a stylistic decision: The entire computer casing is slightly curved upwards, while the screen is flat. The manufacturer therefore points out for good reason that you should always place the supplied protective pad for the screen in between.
The screen is matt, has HD resolution and has quite acceptable colours and brightness distribution for the price range. Basically, with its IPS panel, it is not a typical gamer screen, but it is less dependent on viewing angles and is certainly fast enough for video. The keyboard is also quite usable and even has a separate numeric keypad, the RGB disco lighting under the keys can fortunately be reduced to one colour and low brightness. The slight curvature of the Erazer is a design element, not a production error. In addition to the internal SSD, two slots are available for further mass storage devices, one for a 2.5-inch SSD and one for an M2 SSD with SATA (not NVMe). You have to unscrew quite a few screws for this, but the Erazer is not as inaccessible as a Mac. Unfortunately, an external GPU cannot be connected as an additional turbo, because despite the same socket, the Erazer only offers a USB-C interface and not Thunderbolt 3. Apart from that, the computer is very well equipped with interfaces, and of course you can quickly import material from a CFast card from Blackmagic’s Pocket 6K if the card has been formatted for exFAT.
Test conditions
This time we were braver and tortured the computers with BRAW from the Pocket 6K in the highest quality level and with UHD in H.264 at up to 50 frames per second. The high resolution in the surface also requires a better temporal resolution at a short viewing distance if it is not to shutter. Naturally, the BRAW material was placed on a fast SSD, as these are already quite high data rates. The timeline was also tested with different resolutions and some complex filters. The Mac mini was run with and without eGPU, while the Erazer was tested in battery and mains operation – which also led to noticeable differences.
An endurance test with 6K from the RED was also included. Both managed 24 fps smoothly when set to a quarter of the resolution, which is completely sufficient for a cinema rough cut on a laptop. BRAW, on the other hand, hardly benefits from reduced resolution because it is not a wavelet codec. If you want to work with 6K BRAW in a UHD timeline, 50 fps will not be achieved. Unfortunately, this hardly improves when switching the timeline to HD, as the entire image always has to be decoded.
The Erazer manages 48 fps with difficulty, the Mac mini 44 fps, if you prioritise the CPU there. This already applies to pure playback, grading is out of the question. BRAW should therefore be converted to a less demanding codec such as ProRes, Cineform or DNxHD. If you are not working for the cinema, ProRes directly from the camera is certainly the better alternative. On the other hand, both computers were able to reliably play back material in H.264 at 50 fps in UHD, but there is not much room for grading or even effects. If you need this on the go, you should switch the timeline to HD and only switch back to UHD for the final output.
In addition to the temporal noise reduction with a radius of 1 and the motion detection on Better, we tested the spatial NR with the Enhanced mode, as well as some computing-intensive filters with Film Grain, Aperture Diffraction and Dirt Removal (each in the default setting). In addition, a ten-minute UHD programme was rendered in H.264 and H.265. The Mac with AMD graphics differs massively from the Nvidia card, as H.265 in “Main10” (i.e. 10-bit) is only supported by the latter. The attempt to render H.265 in 10 bit via CPU on the Mac ended with extremely high estimates for the computing time. For the PC laptop, it was very important to find the right driver: We used the studio driver in version 431.86, with all others Resolve was very unstable. As a rule, Resolve is slightly faster with CUDA, only the decoding of BRAW benefits a little more from OpenCL.
The Nvidia GPU shows its strengths when encoding, it can encode H.264 and H.265 significantly faster than QuickSync, the CPU alone takes an extremely long time for this. However, this support is only available under Windows with the purchasable version of Resolve. Despite being set to maximum performance, the Erazer only ran at a very slow pace on battery power. Nevertheless, the battery (which is easy to replace) only lasted a good hour. For Resolve, the laptop can be used on mains power alone.
That’s when it really turned up the heat – unfortunately also with the ventilation, which was almost like a hoover on the table. The Radeon in the eGPU can’t keep up with the Nvidia in the Erazer. The GPU in the Aldi laptop is more powerful, but the CPU is slower. Not true: the battery was empty after an hour under full load. The noise is practically only bearable with closed noise-cancelling headphones. However, all gaming laptops exhibit this heat dissipation problem at high performance.
Comment
Both solutions are reasonably portable, but neither is mains-independent. A gamer laptop with similar features can also be found from other providers, albeit not quite as cheap as from Aldi. A Razer Blade, for example, costs 1,600 euros in a very similar configuration. Such a device is amazingly powerful, but it can only be endured under full load with good headphones. The Mac mini is easier on the nerves, but more expensive, heavier with an eGPU and not as fast with this graphics card. In particular, it lacks the extended options for H.265 compression with Nvidia, which are only supported on the PC in the studio version of Resolve.
