Deciding between two laptops

[ironspider]

Greetings all, my friend recently decided to move across country and that has left the club we have a monthly dance night in every month without any video. I have agreed to take this over because I'm pretty familiar with computers and A/V. I just decided to go with Resolume and I've been watching videos, reading threads, and drinking in the manual on the Resolume page--but I have a problem: my laptop.

My current laptop is my work laptop. It's a 13" MacBook Pro Retina with Iris graphics (it's the i7 one with a 512GB SSD) and it has 2 problems: 1) It's impossibly tiny to see Resolume on it and 2) It is utterly useless in 1080p with the Iris graphics. I can't pull more than 1 layer in the benchmarking routine in either clean or noisy.

So I think I'm going to get a PC laptop to run Resolume on. I'm more of a PC guy anyway and no matter what I choose it will be WAY cheaper than trying to get a 15" MBP with dedicated graphics.

So I'm currently looking at 2 laptops and wanted to see what you all thought about price vs. performance. I've studied the benchmarks in that thread but didn't find either of these two specific cards (I have a 180GB SSD I'll be putting in no matter which I buy). Both have 15.6" screens and are 1920x1080 (I went into best buy and the 17" laptops were just too big for me--I mean I thought a 15.6" was perfect and even a little big).

Machine 1: An open-box model at BestBuy (I know I know, but VJ'ing is the ONLY thing I'll ever be using this laptop for--and it seems to be in good shape). $800.
Asus Q550LF-BSI7T21, i7 (1.8GHz with TurboBoost to 3Ghz), 8GB RAM, 2GB GT 745M. $800. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-15-6-t ... &cp=1&lp=6

Machine 2 (New):
ASUS ROG G550JK-DS71, i7 (2.5Ghz), 8GB RAM, 2GB GTX 850M, $1200 ($1200 is definitely the top of my range) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834231808

I appreciate any advice you can give me. Thanks!

[hive8]

For sure the second one, and get later a SSD in there with a SATA or M.2 connection if possible a Samsung EVO or 850 Pro 256GB is good, if you can have both the 256 and the 750GB then your good to go.

My next laptop is also the an Asus GX500 with the 4K display

[ironspider]

Yeah it turns out that second laptop is actually $1100 not $1200 so I think it's a no brainer. I'll have to check out the one you're talking about though!

Thanks.

[hookerbot]

I'd go for the newegg over best buy model almost regardless of the machine, best buy takes the factory bloatware as a challenge, usually doubling the number of "helpful" utilities included. I returned the one and only laptop I bought from best buy for other reasons, but it was pretty ridiculous. Yes I know you can wipe most of the garbage but its a pain that the customer shouldn't have to deal with.
I'm on phone internet and can't open either link, but the differences between those 2 should be pretty negligible, 745 vs 850 isn't a realy game changer. I don't know if the touchscreen is important to you, or if the rog laptop has it, but it can be a fun way to choose clips while vjing.

Another one that might be worth checking out is the Lenovo y510p, right within your budget and some options available. I have one that I have thus far failed to benchmark, i'll get to it some day...

One last thing
I've said this before and I'll say it again-Getting a laptop with a 4k local monitor for VJing seems like a ridiculous proposition to me. Why would you want to waste your gpu rending 4x as many pixels as 1080 that only you will ever see? Best of luck ironspider, let us know what you get.