Will Adobe CS5 work with Intel HD Graphics card 3000?

Question

I am thinking about buying this laptop. http://www.staples.com/HP-Pavilion-dv7-6163us-17.3-Laptop/product_343565
Will Adobe CS5 run on it OK?

Answer 1

Both of the HP laptops that you mentioned will be quite sluggish in running CS5, even compared to a cheap $400 desktop:
1) Neither of those laptops have more than one single internal hard drive, which is already below Adobe's stated minimum requirements. Adobe requires a minimum of two discrete fast hard drives (no partitions) in order to run CS5 at all. Unfortunately, neither of those HP laptops have an eSATA port at all. (Those HP laptops have two USB 3.0 ports - but USB by itself doesn't support RAID at all.) Nor does either of those two laptops have any provision whatsoever to accommodate nore than the included internal hard drive.
2) Based on the CPU alone, your first choice of a laptop with an i7-2630QM is better - but only if it also has an Nvidia GPU with 1GB or more. The CPU in your second choice, an i5-2410M, is only a dual-core CPU (in fact, all mobile i5's are only dual-core) - and no system (laptop or desktop) with a dual-core CPU performs as well in CS5 as even a mediocre system with a quad-core CPU.
3) Neither of those two HP laptops come with (or is even available with) a GPU that supports MPE GPU acceleration. The first choice has only the integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics while the other comes with an onboard AMD Mobility Radeon GPU. And as we all know, both of those systems would have run CS5 only in MPE software-only mode. There is a plugin to allow CS5 to utilize the QuickSync feature of the first laptop (the second one cannot utilize QuickSync at all because it uses a discrete GPU) - but that would have speeded up only the encoding times (it would not have helped rendering times much if at all).
4) All consumer HP systems - both laptop and desktop - come pre-loaded with a ton of bloatware that cannot be easily uninstalled (or more precisely, software whose uninstallation still leaves behind pieces of it that actually slows down system performance and/or makes it run less stably). Worse, neither laptop includes a system restore disk (all of the restore files are on a locked hard drive partition that can only be accessed by one of HP's authorized service facilities). HP will sell you a recovery/restore disk, but that will cost you an additional fee.
5) Both of those systems come with only 6GB of RAM. In the case of laptops, 8GB is recommended if you're going to run CS5 much. Although the systems theoretically support 16GB of RAM, those two laptops have only two DIMM slots, and there are currently no compatible 8GB modules on the market.
6) Finally, the internal hard drive spins at only 5400 RPM. Laptop hard drives, as a rule, are slower than desktop hard drives (sequential speed wise). You'd be lucky if that 750GB 5400 RPM hard drive can sustain even half the sequential speed of the slowest current-production "Green" desktop hard drive.
As a result, both of those laptops would have been slower in the PPBM5 benchmark than most (if not all) of the desktops on the PPBM5 results list.
Message was edited by: RjL190365