I’ve selected a few excellent 2023 laptops between $1000 and $2000 to run DaVinci Resolve, and any other post production software you need.
Article Last Updated: July 2023
This list includes both the latest M2 Apple Silicon powered Macs and plenty of powerful PC options. While DaVinci Resolve’s minimum system requirements are met by a greater range of laptops than ever.
I highly recommend you buy DaVinci Resolve Studio rather than use the free version of Resolve. DaVinci Resolve Studio enables H.264/H.265 decode and encode hardware acceleration using the GPU and this will make a world of difference if you’re working with any AVC/H.264 or H.265/HEVC media. The alternative is to transcode these camera files into high quality Avid DNxHR files before you start editing for better performance. The files will be larger, but require less system resources to play back, and are much more post production friendly.
Below are five good budget laptop choices for DaVinci Resolve under $2000. These are not the only five, it’s also worth taking a look at the “other products related to this item” to find more options.
When checking any Windows laptop, the system RAM and GPU are the two most important factors to consider. A decent capacity internal SSD is also important, as you can use it for both cache, and media if you really don’t want to carry an external SSD. However, I would always recommend a USB-C external SSD for your media drive.
Apple have turned the conventional concept of minimum hardware requirements for Resolve upside down with the Apple Silicon Macs. If you’re performing common color correction processes, using compressed video codecs, or even RAW, at 4K (or higher) resolution, it’s now possible to run Resolve very well on any M2 Macbook Pro, or even a M2 Macbook Air with only 8GB of system RAM. This is counter intuitive to everything I’ve written before about minimum system requirements for Resolve, but Apple Silicon is just different.
Below I’m listing the best laptops for DaVinci Resolve that I can find around the $1000 mark. As of the time of writing, all the best options are basically the same configuration as below, but many have the i5-10300H. The Dell G15 below offers the i5-12500H which is a better CPU.
Computing power whether desktop, laptop, or mobile has well and truly caught up with the demands of professional creative software. And software such as DaVinci Resolve which was once considered niche to the highest end of the film, production and broadcast industry is now mainstream. Everyone creating video content now has access to the best tools in the business.
You are no longer limited by your tools, and the knowledge required to use them is for the most part free and plentiful. The barriers to entry have never been lower.