Yes, the results were interesting. My own antique desktop with an i5 3rd Gen and gtx1050 ti took 18secs. My understanding is that the gpu is making the most diff, and that the laptop GPUs are nowhere close to the same numbered desktop parts.
@aadm even if I can’t help with the laptop (I am pretty much a ThinkPad fanboy) I’d like to know a few things about DaVinci Resolve as I have trouble with OpenShot. I know how to handle basic tasks in OpenShot (import, cut, export etc) but I would look into another solution for my short GoPro clips and films because OS sometimes performs weird (to put it nicely) - two days ago I could not cut clips anymore, and the program freezes regularly.
SO: DaVinci Resolve …
- do they offer a ppa?
- or do you need to download and simply extract?
- stable on intel i7 / Nvidia?
@beachbum Hi Stefan, I guess we’ve had common experience, something “weird” would happen when doing simple cuts & edits of my family videos (for me a mixture of smartphone videos, gopros and the occasional dslr clip) using kdenlive or shotcut. I tried Davinci Resolve and well, apart from the sheer bulk of it (I mean you can do everything with this thing), it’s actually quite easy to learn how to do simple editing, adding titles and do basic color grading (there’s people here that have recommended Resolve also for color grading of photos!). So yeah, I’d recommend it.
To answer your questions:
- no ppa but you have to download the zip file that they offer for free (in exchange for your name, email etc); then you convert the zip file to a .deb package you can install with
sudo apt install [output.deb]. You do the conversion with a script by Daniel Tuffvesson, makeresolvedeb. Be prepared to have a couple of Gb available on your disks. - everything is super stable and just works. My current laptop is like yours, i7 + nvidia gpu (details in the original post above). Once again I stress that I mainly use the “cut” and “edit” modules with occasional usage of the excellent clip stabilizer and some simple curves to add contrast and saturation (both functionalities available in the “color” module). I have been using v16 for some time and just a couple of days ago installed the new 17 beta (I can’t tell the differences between the two honestly).
- you need to know that however our source h264 clips from gopro and other consumer devices need to be transcoded to prores or DNxHD / DNxHR formats to be accepted by Resolve. I think this is only a peculiarity of the linux version. I have made a bash script to convert automatically all clips in a folder to resolve format. I will put it on github now and post the link later.
Hi again! I know this is a boring discussion but I’ll try ask for a tiny bit of extra help… I’m getting a bit lost…
After a few emails with Tuxedo customer care (good job on this! the first few days nobody would answer, then they got back to me multiple times and very quickly) I decided on their Book XP15 model, which is failry light (~2kg) + lots of configuration options.
I am struggling to understand which of these 3 options are the best considering the above mentioned use case (darktable+davinci resolve):
- i7-10750h (6-core) + Nvidia Geforce RTX2060 6Gb = EUR 1796
- i7-10750h (6-core) + Nvidia Geforce RTX2080 SUPER Max-Q 8Gb = 2476 EUR
- i7-10875h (8-core) + Nvidia Geforce RTX2070 Refresh Max-Q 8Gb = 2216 EUR
I have seen that on benchmarks the performance icnrease from 10750h to 10875h is fairly minimal and probably not something I’d notice?
While the jump from RTX2060 to RTX2080 should be pretty big but again, is it something that could only be noticed in gaming (which I’m not interested) or would I see it in Darktable and Resolve, i.e. in activities hwere the GPU is used only to speed up calculations?
thanks everyone in advance!
Actually it is not minimal, it is 6 cores vs 8 cores with slightly higher frequency, so like 35% speed-up for multithreaded tasks, which is the case for both Darktable and Resolve.
I would personally choose faster CPU, and wouldn’t care much about GPU between those you mentioned, because at least in Darktable it is not utilized for 100% tasks, so difference would be pretty small. Don’t know about Resolve (how much of GPU it utilizes).
2 Likes
well there you go, thanks for that! exactly the kind of information that I was looking for.
Just as a curiosity, this is the cpu comparison that led me to the “fairly minimal difference” I mentioned above:
I know, maybe I should have looked deeper but for a non-expert like me I see in the first line +1% increase from one cpu to the other and this is for me “minimal”…
Other comparison:
where the performances are 80 to 84 in single core performance and 29 to 36 (i7-10750H 6-core vs i7-10874H 8-core)…
I’m glad to be helpful 
Another point is that website userbenchmark.com is known to be not the best/honest place for benchmark stats. I’ve seen multiple times when people suggested to avoid it.
In my opinion, passmark is more reliable (here is a link to comparison of these two cpus): Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz vs Intel Core i7-10875H @ 2.30GHz [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software
Or cinebench:
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r20_multi_core-10
If cpu is important, then ryzen easily beats anything that Intel has to offer.
Also, does resolve free version make use of the gpu?
well yes I wanted to get an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H but couldnt find a good combination on the Tuxedo models I was checking (the Polaris 15 I mentioned at the beginning of the thread; much cheaper than the Book XP15 but little things here and there don’t add up to the laptop I want/need). So I realize that I’m paying a premium just because… Intel ! but the Book XP model doesn’t ship with AMD cpus etc.
It would have been different if I was just building a desktop computer but with laptops is difficult to have one with exactly the features you want. The other options from larger manufacturers were limited to a couple of models from Lenovo where I could specifiy all the ocmponents I wanted (thinkpad X1 extreme and T15g) but they are (1) much more expensive, (2) have to wait 5-6 weeks for building & shipping.
Oh and regarding gpu usage, yes I’m using Resolve free which doesn’t even start if the gpu is not active.
hi, sorry picking up this old thread, but I’m looking for a new laptop as well.
What have you decided to get?
You may find this thread I started a little while ago interesting - I’m quite happy with the Corsair machine I settled on, although I couldn’t say it’s perfect, it’s pretty good, and fast, at least by my standards.
Only running windows though, so far.
Hi, I have Lenovo Thinkpad E14 Gen2 with AMD Ryzen 7 4700U + 16Gb 3200 + Win11 and I have no problem with darktable+OpenCL and even Davinci Resolve. But there is no huge advantage to use darktable with OpenCL since CPU is more powerful than integrated GPU. Haven’t tested any Linux distribution.
hello @Dinobe, sorry to be late with my reply – haven’t spent much time here lately.
Well this is an old thread, but in the end I didn’t go with a Tuxedo (I can’t recall the exact motivations: probably price/performance?). What I ended up buying back in December 2020 is a fairly generic laptop from pcspecialist.it (they have also european shops: *.co.uk, *.ie etc) called Recoil IV. It’s a rebranded Tongfang laptop as I discovered later so very generic! It was supposed to be a gaming laptop I think, and it came with an intel cpu i7-10875H, a Geforce RTX2070 with 8Gb; I specced it with 32Gb ram and 3Tb storage total (1Tb+2Tb SSD NVMe). Total cost around €2200.
Disadvantages: heavy as a brick, the charger is even heavier so double bricks in your bag! Definitely can’t do what the cool apple kids do (take it out at the coffee shop, very stylish, one-handed etc). When you do heavy lifting the fan kicks in and is rather noisy too.
Advantages: very powerful! Darktable and Resolve run smoothly, all operations are instantaneous even now, almost 3 years in. I would change it only for a much slimmer, more portable laptop – but will it be as powerful as this one? Only ever tried with linux (simple Ubuntu) so can’t say anything about windows performances.
One of the reasons I went with this was also the presence of a mechanical keyboard which was a must back then. It would not be same priority now because 90% of the time I use it lid-down connected to an external Benq 27" screen and a mechanical keyboard (which is way better than any laptop keyboard even this one that was supposed to be a good one; I still find the lenovo thinkpad keyboards the best however despite not being “mechanical”).
I hope this helps
2 Likes
Thanks for the reply. I don’t know if I should bump this old thread. Anyway I can’t make up my mind about the new laptop I’m considering.
Right now I have an aging windows 10 machine (9 years old). Since 2019 I’ve been tinkering with Linux on an old thrash pc for when the time comes when I actually want to buy a new computer and change ship to Linux. As time moved on I slowly changed my mind to getting a laptop instead of a building a new PC. Reason being that I don’t want to sit alone in the home study while my wife and kids are sitting downstairs watching tele…
So I need something portable to move between the home study and the living room. Ultra portable is not strictly necessary and the laptop will seldomly leave the house. For serious photo editing I will be sitting in the study upstairs and using my external Dell 25" monitor which is calibrated and profiled.
I would like to have an integrated solution; I don’t want to start messing about with dongles and external harddrives to get the work done.
So that means enough internal storage, preferably 2 harddrive slots, enough access ports (USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, …)
Those slim looking devices with only 2 usb-c ports, all nice and stylish but highly unpractical.
The biggest question for me right now is, should I go for a device with dedicated GPU (nvidia RTX …) or will the integrated Intel Iris XE suffice?
Adding a nvidia RTX card to any laptop adds €400 on average to the price. I’m also worried about heat, noise, weight,… it adds to the machine.
While I will be using the machine mostly at home, I feel I don’t want to lug around a 2,5 kilogram laptop and equally heavy powerbrick
That said, for know I’m looking a couple off devices:
- Tuxedo Infinitybook 16 Gen 8 (Intel i7 13700H, RTX 4060 8GB, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME, 2560x1600 IPs - €2.044)
Nice looking laptop, 16:10 display, possibility to add 2nd NVME drive, Tuxed supports Linux, they have their own distro (TuxedoOS). They provide tools like the TuxedoControl center, they activly develop for linux, provide firmware updates etc…
In order to make it run at it’s full potential you need to use the barrel charger. So neat docking stations with USB-C will not provide enough power.
- Slimbook Executive 16 (Intel i7 13700H, RTX 4060 8GB, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME, 2560x1600 IPs - €1.974.00)
I guess this is basically the same device as the Tuxedo Infinitybook, but from the less known slimbook manufacturer (located in Spain), slightly cheaper.
You can have it with a variety of linux distro’s . I don’t think they provide something like TuxedoControlCenter.
Some alternatives
- Skikk Loki 15 II (Intel i7 12700H, RTX3070ti 8GB, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME, 2560x1440, IPS, 97% SRG - €1.503)
This is an interesting deal right now. It’s a slightly older model. Not the latest generation cpu and GPU, but more than powerfull enough for my needs. Skikk say they don’t give Linux support, but you can have it installed with Ubuntu from them. So I guess all hardware does work.
But it’s a gaming laptop. So I’m worried about the heat, fan noise,… I dislike these gaming laptops with this RGB lighting. If I want a christmas tree, I’ll put one in my living room. But it’s 500-700 euro’s cheaper than the Tuxedo Infinitybook. I could build a 2nd computer for that, or spend the money on a new lens, …
And yes all these models are rebranded Tongfang and/or Clevo designs. I have no experience either of them.
The good thing is that you can service the machines and replace memory, harddrives, battery yourself.
-
Thinkpad T16 Gen 2 (Intel i7 1365u, 32GB RAM, 2TB NVME, 1920x1200, ips, Intel iris XE gpu, - €1.873)
I’ve had Thinkpads in the past, they are rugged and reliable. This one comes with Ubuntu support, has a nice selection of ports.
But no dedicated GPU, no 2 harddrives that’s why I added the 2TB drive, soldered RAM). -
Dell XPS15 (Intel i7 13700h, 32GB RAM, 2TB NVME, RTX 4050 6GB, 1920x1200 display - €2.249)
Some amazing looking and powerful laptop, stylish, lightweight expensive, yes, but not crazy overly expensive compared to the others.
Unfortunately no longer support for Ubuntu. Some have tried to install Linux but some off the hardware like the speakers don’t work… Dell used to have Ubuntu support, but no longer for the latest model it seems. No numeric keyboard, only fancy USB-C so dongles are needed.
I torn between the Tuxedo Infinitybook or the Skikk Loki. That €500 gap is significant)
I know you guys can’t decide for me, just sharing my thoughts…
1 Like
well I have enjoyed reading about what’s new on the market today. Sometimes I think about replacing mine which has the key features you dislike (heavy, rgb keyboard, noisy, did I say heavy??) with something more similar to a macbook.
My first laptop where I tinkered before ditching my macbook and going full linux was a 2nd hand thinkpad, then a Dell XPS 15, very good computer but it failed miserably after a while (battery issues).
I still like tuxedo (I was just checking the infinitybook 14, looks nice and it’s light!).
What I would recommend is still opt for something with a nvidia gpu though, esp. if you’re into darktable (and possibly video editing like Resolve).
I got almost exactly this, on sale for CAD$2198 (just 512GB NVMe instead of 2TB). It came with Windows 11 Home. I just updated and backed up Windows, then got rid of it and installed Ubuntu 23.10, and it has been absolutely problem free. There were a few XPS 15 configurations with Linux, but I got a better deal on this one.
The numeric keypad is used for a lot of Geeqie shortcuts, so that’s been a bit of a pain.
This is my primary beef, and not just with Dell. Laptop makers are rushing to be all USB-C, but peripheral makers are not there. So far, I have a USB-C to USB-A and HDMI adapter that came with the laptop and seems a bit flimsy, as well as two USB-C to USB-A adapters and a USB-C to RJ-45 adapter that I bought.
I hate trackpads, so I am using one of my USB-C to USB-A adapters for a mouse. I’m presently searching for a good wireless mouse with a USB-C receiver.
Ok that’s nice to know. On reddit I found people having issues with Ubuntu 22.04, like speakers not properly working, external display not working, webcam not working… If i’m spending +2k on a machine I want to make sure it works…
I went 23.10 because 22.04 came out well before the machine. So far, I have managed to avoid snaps beyond the pre-installed Firefox snap.