Is XPS 9570 i5 base model good for 4k editing

I don't know if an eGPU works with the 9570.  Dell doesn't officially support eGPUs except on Alienware systems, and then only through their proprietary Alienware Graphics Amplifier, so if having that option is important to you, I'd recommend doing some research to see if others have successfully used an eGPU with the 9570.  I'm betting it will work, but I don't know certain.  I've also read that eGPUs tend to be easier to set up when your internal system only has one GPU, especially if you want to use the eGPU to accelerate content being displayed on the internal display rather than just displays physically connected to the eGPU itself.

For light editing work, if the application you're using actually taps into the dGPU/eGPU itself, then it should be fine.  For heavier editing work, you'd want to consider that the XPS 15 is still designed to be thin and light, which means that it doesn't have a very robust cooling system, and therefore running the CPU and GPU at high loads for prolonged periods is likely to induce thermal performance throttling.  If you want a system that won't run into that, especially considering that mobility isn't a concern, you might want to look into the new Alienware m15 or the Precision 15 7000 models

Thank you, jpughan.

I have a follow up question: how good does Intel 630 handle light 4K editing? Is it doable but takes much longer time, or is 4k editing out of reach of Intel 630?

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@JazYa wrote:

Thank you, jpughan.

I have a follow up question: how good does Intel 630 handle light 4K editing? Is it doable but takes much longer time, or is 4k editing out of reach of Intel 630?

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I'm the wrong person to ask that question.  You might find actual test results that are similar to your intended use case if you do some searching, though.  I'd look for reviews of the Intel 630 itself rather than the XPS 15 9570 specifically, since you'll capture more possible results.  Literally just try Googling "Intel 630 4K video editing" and see what you find.  But my prediction is that if you only need to do basic edits like trimming and maybe a few transition effects or overlays here and there, it will be slow but doable.  Export/render times will probably be the same way, although if you encode in H.264 you'll at least have hardware acceleration available for that, so it'll still be much better than software.  But I seriously doubt you'd be able to do any real-time effects rendering at all.

Also check with the publisher of the editing software you use.  Many have requirements for hardware -- but look not at the minimum requirements, but at the recommended ones - if the software recommends a true discrete GPU, buy a different system that has one - the XPS models are hybrids.  They do not have true, discrete GPUs.

I did research before posting but didn't find any test result. Maybe I will have to try it myself in real life.

Thank you again for your help.

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@ejn63 wrote:

Also check with the publisher of the editing software you use.  Many have requirements for hardware -- but look not at the minimum requirements, but at the recommended ones - if the software recommends a true discrete GPU, buy a different system that has one - the XPS models are hybrids.  They do not have true, discrete GPUs.

 

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I guess it depends on how you define "discrete".  It's fully independent from the CPU and its integrated GPU, and it has its own dedicated video memory.  Yes, it's soldered onto the motherboard rather than being a physical card, but that doesn't make a practical difference.  And yes, it's not physically wired to any display outputs, but as long as the editing application can leverage Optimus, then that doesn't matter.  The NVIDIA GPU in this system still offers meaningful performance, and that's what matters.

In the English I speak, discrete means separate or standalone.  In this system the nVidia GPU isn't standalone.

There are plenty of software packages that recommend -- or require -- true, hardware-level, board to display GPUs.

That's not what the XPS system has - and what it DOES have is what a lot of software (Adobe, Autodesk, etc.) has trouble running with.

My apologies, sir.  As always, you're always right -- and we're always wrong. 

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@ejn63 wrote:

My apologies, sir.  As always, you're always right -- and we're always wrong.

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Wow, ok.  Setting aside the question of this "we" you claim to represent, I specifically agreed with you that if the OP needs to use tools that don't work with Optimus, then Optimus would be a bad choice.  That's perfectly obvious.  I simply suggested actually looking into whether that was the case, because there are very few laptops on the market with "fully discrete" GPU setups, and they tend to be larger, heavier, and more expensive -- so if the OP's intended applications would work just fine with a more common Optimus setup, then why deal with additional size, weight, and cost that could have been avoided?  I recognize that some applications have issues with Optimus -- but the key word is "some".  There are plenty of applications that work perfectly fine on Optimus, and failing to acknowledge that and instead suggesting that the OP should avoid Optimus altogether could cause people to ignore laptops that they might have preferred for a variety of reasons and that would have worked perfectly well for their purposes.