Sam's Club Members: ASUS VivoBook 15.6" Laptop: i7-1165G7, 1080p OLED, 16GB, 1TB SSD Expired

Hi! Where would you find a machine with similar specs (i.e. 11th gen i7, 1TB sdd and 16GB ram) for sub $500? I'm looking for one, but just about anything with those specs is $900+...?

This CPU excels in single-threaded apps but because it only has 4 cores, it gets trounced by the AMD Ryzen 4700U/4800U in multi-threaded apps. That means that it does great with most everyday tasks like web browsing and MS Office apps. In fact, it beats the Ryzen by 10-20%. However, those are apps where speed doesn't matter all that much. I mean, do you really notice if a page updates 10% faster? Relevant to you, however, is that one review found this CPU to be faster in Photoshop. Your photo editing program may have different results, especially if it uses multi-threading.

It's a different story for video editing. If you do a lot of video compression, for example encoding in HEVC x265, then the Ryzen trounces this CPU. This matters to me since I am converting a lot of old videos to x265 to save space. Some videos are 8-10 hrs long and take 2-5+ hours to compress. That's when speed really matters and you'll notice a difference between the Intel and Ryzen. So if you plan on saving your videos in x265 to save space (and you should!), or do other extensive video manipulation, then the Ryzen might be a better choice. Same goes for other mathematically-intensive tasks like 3D modeling, etc. I bought a Ryzen 4700U notebook on eBay for about $379 just for video editing.

Overall, this is a great notebook for photo and video editing unless speed is an issue. For minor editing and short TikTok videos, it probably wouldn't matter. On the plus side, you're getting an OLED screen and 16gb of RAM, which I've never seen at this price. My 4700U notebook, for example, only has 8gb. That can make difference if you're editing large videos. Basically, the more video you can put into RAM, the less the computer needs to access the video on a slower hard drive/SSD. RAM is much faster than any hard drive or SSD.

As for the OLED screen, I've never even considered getting an OLED notebook because the screen is normally so expensive. My guess is that the screen makes up half the price of this notebook. With OLED, you'll get incredible contrast and colors will really pop out. That can matter if you're doing precise photo and video touchups, but it also contributes to a wonderful viewing experience. This is especially true if several people are watching the screen. OLED screens have better viewing angles, where watching from the sides won't affect picture quality as much as that on an LCD screen, where colors fade.

Another plus is that OLED screens can extend battery life. LCD screens are back (or side) lit. Generally speaking, that means the LEDs backlighting the screen are on full brightness, regardless of how bright the image is. What you see is how much light is allowed through the LCD crystals, not how bright the backlight LEDs actually are. A good analogy is the blinds in your bedroom. What your neighbor sees is how much light you let through the blinds, not how much light is actually in your room. That means a totally blank (black) screen will use just as much energy as a bright white image. Not so with OLED. Each pixel is it's own LED (actually 3 LEDs: red, green and blue to produce colors). The more pixels you turn on, the more energy is used. The darker the image, the less energy you use. A totally black screen has no lit pixels so it uses no energy. This can matter if you plan on being battery powered a lot.

The only downside is burn-in. People who do a lot of wordprocessing or spreadsheet work often have the same image on the screen for long stretches of time. For example, the formatting bar (bold, italic, underline, etc) on top of a wordprocessor remains the same as you type away. That leads to burn-in, where a faint image of that formatting bar will stay permanently on the screen even when you're using another app. The secret to fighting burn-in is to change the screen image frequently. A screensaver may help, but that only works when you're not using the computer. There are apps for phones that shift the screen by a few pixels at regular intervals. Because the shift is so small, it may not be noticeable. However, I don't know if such apps exist for Windows. Your best bet is to not use a single app with a single image for long stretches of time. But if your primary apps (e.g. wordprocessing) have a lot of static areas where the image doesn't change, then an OLED screen might not be the best choice.

In summary, this is great computer for photo and video editing, and especially for watching videos. But if speed matters, then a 4700U notebook might be better. However, the 16gb RAM might offset the slower CPU. So I'd say grab one if you can find it.

PS - oh wow, this post got way longer than I had intended! I'm writing on a phone so I had no idea what the final results were.

Wishful stupidity! You cannot show one example of a machine with these specs anywhere today for under $800 and we start talking about brands like gateway! If you cannot same something constructive, then just do not say anything at all!