I’ve spent a little more time with the Stealth 16 Studio A13V. It turns out this high-powered laptop is good for more than playing games. It’s also great at rendering video! Content creators and digital artists of all kinds know that video rendering is something of a nightmare. However powerful you think your computer is, converting video footage will leave you humbled and bloody. This laptop isn’t the last word on video work, to be clear. However, the difference in performance between this machine and my last rig is downright ridiculous.
The Conversion Crunch
Said old rig is an Acer Predator 300 SE. I won’t get too bogged down in details, but a normal video project was also a serious slog. In particular, converting footage took me an entire workday. The machine also got so hot I was concerned about it catching fire. I can’t overstate how labor-intensive this activity is. The A13V handles a similar workload in around 40 minutes. Of course, it also gets pretty hot doing so. We’re still talking about a laptop here, after all.
For reference, I use DaVinci Resolve to make videos. Adobe Premiere got uninstalled roughly 20 minutes after I found out how free the alternative is. The answer is completely! And yet, there are downsides to this program. For one thing, it’s a little harder to run on most machines. Chopping and stitching 4K footage takes a crazy amount of CPU power, which the Predator 300 SE didn’t quite have. So I needed to use several wacky workarounds. Things like proxy footage and lower timeline resolution. The A13V doesn’t need any of this duct tape nonsense to run DaVinci. It just works! How about that?
So Simple It’s Magical
Finally, most video renders take something like 10 minutes to execute. This is about a sixth of the time needed for the Predator 300 SE to do the same thing. Which is amazing! So, to recap. If you’re the sort of gamer who also creates and publishes footage of your best work online, your gaming laptop needs to be a straight-up monster. And it stands to reason that any laptop that can quickly render video can do just about anything. In other words, now that I’ve tested the Stealth 16 Studio A13V in these two crucial arenas? I’m pretty sure this laptop can do whatever I need, even the stuff I haven’t thought of yet.