Hardware specs

[Crystalet]

I have been using my old laptop for a long time but recently tried to get into YouTube recordings.

I am looking to buy a new laptop and need some help picking the right hardware.

I use my hardware for a long time so looking to buy something decent

I would be running the following applications (all will be scenes in OBS)
- Bloomberg. Very ram heavy
- real time trading applications + updating charting
- chrome

And then OBS screen recordings. I have two additional wide screens connected to the machine as well.

I quite like the ASUS duo machines (14 or 15 inch). Some come with AMD and some with intel. Some with dedicated graphics cards some with integrated.

I am quite lost to understand what OBS needs to record smoothly. I tried doing this on my laptop but it was terrible. My current one has only 2 cores.

Is there any guidance someone can give me?

Many thanks

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

An ancient 2-core CPU... yea not enough for modern real-time video encoding
The issue I, and most others, will have is that while your description is a system that is NOT CPU nor GPU intensive, your hardware requirements depends on factors you don't specify.. ex resolution, frame rate, green screen/chroma keying, noise suppression or other filters/effects, etc.. the list goes on... And when you say RAM heavy, what exactly does that mean? 32GB, 64GB, 128GB of RAM?

For largely a screen recording at 1080p30, with a small webcam style picture-in -picture, a 5+yr old gaming laptop would be plenty... start adding CPU demanding filters, effects, re-scaling, etc... it depends

With low complexity and sophistication of recording, your needs do NOT appear need a high-end system. BUT.. with what was not stated, could mean any mid-range current CPU being fine, to needing a more powerful system. The challenge is that one typically starts out simpler, then starts adding on, and those add-ons possibly being hardware resource demanding... so impossible to say. And when wanting long-life, you are likely looking at 4K standard videos in a few years, which takes a lot more than 1080p...
And then there is the fact that laptops are subject to thermal throttling much sooner than desktop/tower PC. So depending on recording/editing timeframes, you may need to consider care around laptop cooling (there are DIY/aftermarket approaches to help systems not designed to sustain high-performance for extended timeframes... which may or may not make much difference)

Personally, Intel has annoyed me greatly with failed roadmaps (under NDA) in recent years, not to mention security failures. On the other hand, AMD creates parts, and most people want a functioning system, and AMD's software tends to be poor to terrible. So, pick whichever is the lesser of the 2 evils from your perspective. AMD CPUs is general are more energy efficient at the moment (which means less heat, better battery life in a laptop, all else being equal .. which it never is). Current streaming providers tend to take H.264 inputs due to H.265 licensing mess. The new kid on the block is AV1, but might be a while before accepted as a standard streaming input. Creating AV1 encoded video is really computationally demanding, and only the most recent GPUs are including such support {hardware encode offload} and therefore risk 1st gen 'features'/bugs) So, if you want a laptop with a long life, and presumably be able to handle 4K AV1 output, you are looking at, i think, only the latest dedicated GPUs, and the nVidia RTX40xx mobile chips aren't even out to consumer yet (i think early next year?) same for AMD?

So, how soon do you need to buy and what is your timeframe? I'm waiting for a 13th gen mobile HX CPU and AV1 capable GPU, USB4 speeds, and more [for a mobile video editing workstation, not OBS]... such a workstation class laptop hopefully available in q1 (maybe q2) next year, with a list price most likely over US$4K though discounted for probably about 1/2 that.. hopefully... notice number of hopefully's in that sentence. If you need something now, you'll need to clarify expectations, and expected system usable lifetime for real-time video encoding, and go from there

 

[Crystalet]

@Lawrence_SoCal thank you so much for taking the time to write a long and detailed response.

I will do some testing tomorrow to see how much resources those applications use. I will then report back and also try and answer more of your questions.

I know my post showed how little I really understand about the hardware, but that is exactly why I am asking here.

I am not in a rush to purchase (I can withstand the frustration of my lagging mouse on my monitor a little while longer - or the need to close one application to use the other (and vice versa)

Will report back when I have the data.