Freelance videographer here. Shoot 4K, do some motion graphics on the side.
Old machine was a 2019 MacBook Pro. Lately it's been struggling – 4K timelines stuttering, exports taking forever, fans sounding like a jet engine. Needed an upgrade but budget was tight. Picked up a GEEKOM A8 Max (Ryzen 9 8945HS + 32GB RAM) thinking it'd be a temporary thing.
Then yesterday I timed an export.
Same 10-minute 4K video in DaVinci:
MacBook Pro: 18 minutes
GEEKOM A8 Max: 12 minutes
Six minutes faster.
Tried some other stuff:
Topaz Video AI upscaling – literally twice as fast as the MBP
Stable Diffusion locally – 8 seconds per 512×512 image
Photoshop Neural Filters – instant, no waiting
Friend came over, saw me editing 4K with SD running in the background and asked when I dropped $5k on a new workstation.
I said it was a $700 mini PC.
He made me pull up the receipt.
Posted by Illustrious-Debt7384
6 Comments
How’s the cooling? Does it get loud when rendering?
Brand new vs 7 years old
This sounds like an ad because the answer is obvious and the picture usage as well.
Ports enough for external drives and monitors?
Thing with better hardware performs better…
In other news, water is wet.
Any downsides?