Video Editor's Review Of The Dell Precision 5680 – Best PC Laptop For Editing Video in 2024
This is the Dell precision 5680. And it is one of the best PC laptops that I’ve ever used for video editing. Mild spoiler for how I feel about this laptop out of the way. In this video, I’m going to be reviewing this laptop from the perspective of a video editor. So if you are someone that’s looking for a powerful video editing laptop, keep watching. Also, for the sake of ethics, you know, this video is not paid or sponsored by Dell, but this laptop was provided to me by them. Now, if you have watched my previous
videos, you will know that I’ve made video reviews of the XPS 15 in 2018 and the XPS 17 and 2021. But this laptop is different because this is from Dell’s precision line of workstation laptops, meaning that it is significantly more focused on product activity than anything else. And while you could technically game on it, the graphics card in it is one of Nvidia’s ADA GPUs that’s really more focused on high level productivity and not games productivity like video editing. So let’s talk about the precision 5680, starting with its build quality and features, because this is
easily one of the best built PC laptops that I’ve ever used. And I would say that it competes very well with
the precision. Most egregiously, these new XPS laptops have replaced the function row as well as the escape key at the top with a touch sensitive bar of icons to light up when you tap on them. And while this can look really cool in pictures, actually using it is a major pain. In short, it feels like Delta everything Apple is doing with their touch bar on their Macs, ignoring all of the complaints the users had about it so that Apple was discontinuing the touch bar and said, Hey, this is our time to have a touch bar
with enough of our competitors using it. So they added it in. thankfully, the precision 5680 does not have any of these issues. It has a normal function, key row. It has a touchpad with edges and most importantly, it has a full size SD card slot. Anyways, rant over in regards to the XPS 14 and 16 versus the precision. If you’re a creator, it’s a no brainer to buy the precision with all of its features and capabilities, and I find it pretty much perfectly positioned to compete with a MacBook Pro. Moving on, let’s talk about more
features of this laptop. And to start, we need to go back to the trackpad because this is a force touch style trackpad, meaning that does not actually click anytime you press down on it. Instead, a haptic motor is going to give you feedback that feels like a click. I find this click feedback to feel good, but also slightly weak. I wish it was just a bit stronger of a vibration whenever you click. That said, compared to the XPS 17 where I always felt myself needing to click in the bottom left corner, you can now click
anywhere and the laptop will click properly, which is great. In addition, this laptop comes with a fingerprint reader and windows Hello, which is a feature where the webcam will scan your face and log you in. And I find this to be extremely convenient and I’m frankly shocked that Apple has not introduced face ID into their MacBooks yet. You can’t log in with your face on a MacBook. But Dell has been doing this for years with their laptops. So point for them. Now as far as speakers go for the precision in Dell’s marketing, they say that
it has four grade eight speakers. I’m not going to do a direct comparison between the Dell and a MacBook speakers because I do not have a MacBook handy to do that. But to my ears, these are some of the best speakers that Dell has ever put into a laptop and they sound significantly better than my XPS 17, which already had quite good speakers. That said, if you are a video editor, you’re not going to want to use the built in speakers on any laptop. You’re going to want to use headphones, which thankfully this laptop does
have a headphone jack, so plug in some headphones and edit your videos that way. Let’s now get into things that video editors are really going to care about, starting with the screen following in the tradition of Dell laptops that I’ve owned save for my first way back in 2005. The precision 5680, unsurprisingly, comes with a 16 by ten OLED screen and it looks absolutely fantastic. The colors are vibrant and the contrast is unbeatable. But if you’re a video editor, you’re probably wondering about the screen color accuracy because of the colors aren’t correct on the screen.
You’re not going to be able to color grade your videos properly. Well, here’s where things get really interesting, because I ran into a significant issue with my XPS 17 screen. It took me a while to figure out Let me explain the screen on my XPS 17 looked gorgeous, but after using it for a few months, I realized that while I had color calibrated the screen using my spider color corrector, which reported that the screen colors were accurate, I was running into an issue where the footage that I was editing on the XPS 17 looked significantly
more saturated and contrasty than it did on any other screen. I could literally color great a video on the XPS 17, then bring that same video project over to a different computer and the colors would not look nearly as good. This even led to me uploading a video that I had color graded on the XPS 17 and me receiving comments on YouTube from people asking why the colors look so washed out. I spent quite a while trying to fix this, including recalibrating the screen, downloading Dell’s premiere color application, which lets you adjust the colors that
the screen is showing. And even reaching out to Dell and making them aware of the issue. But after doing all that, I never found a fix for it. And while I would still edit videos on my XPS 17 from time to time, I would not trust it for color grading and I would wait until I was home with my desktop with a screen that I knew had accurate colors to color graded properly back to the precision 5680. Now I am so pleased to tell you that does not suffer from any of these issues. And in
my testing, the colors look the same on this laptop as they do on any other computer that I’ve tested on. Meaning that if you want to use this laptop for color grading, you can expect it to be accurate. it’s not surprising considering this laptop is a workstation that is purpose built for content creation and other work like it. But I’m glad to see this color accuracy and as a plus at the time of making this video. Apple is still not putting OLED screens in their MacBooks. And to my eyes, this screen is prettier and one
of the best that you can get in a laptop today. Now, let’s talk about battery life. And this is an area where the precision performs well for a PC laptop. But if we’re comparing it to a mac, it’s not going to do as well. And there are two big reasons for this. First, Apple’s laptops with their new Apple silicon chips are some of the most efficient laptops that you can buy today, giving you great battery life, even with a heavy workload like video editing with a precision 5680. Like I said, the battery life is still
good for a PC, but I would expect it to be more in the range of 3 to 4 hours when video editing. There is also a significantly bigger issue than the battery life though. And I’m going to preface this by telling you this is an issue that all PC laptops that I’ve ever used have faced. So this is more of an issue with Windows and how it handles laptops on battery versus how Macs handle laptops on battery. The issue is that if your PC laptop is on battery power and not plugged in, even if you
have gone into Windows settings and told it to use maximum power while on battery windows is going to do its own thing and it’s not going to listen to you. And what you’re going to discover is that your computer power is going to be limited when using it on battery versus when it’s plugged in. Like I said, this is a known issue. Dell is quite aware of it. They even have a feature in their Dell optimization app that they include with the laptop that says that all prioritize foreground apps on battery power. but whenever I
enable this feature on the laptop, I do not see any improvement in rendering speeds. What this means is that if you are using a mac on battery power, it will perform virtually identically to how it will perform. When plugged in, which means for you as a video editor, you’re going to be able to edit and render videos quickly, even on battery with a PC laptop like the Dell Precision. If you’re editing or rendering a video on battery power, you’re going to notice that it feels and performs slower when editing on battery, It’s still usable, but
you will definitely notice a difference in battery power versus whenever you plug it in. if you want a real world example of this difference in power on battery versus plugged in, let’s dive in and talk about how fast this laptop is for video editing. And specifically I want to talk about it in two of the most important ways a laptop will affect you if you are a video editor. First, let’s talk about timeline performance. This is how fast and responsive the laptop is going to be when it comes to you clicking around in your video
editing software, starting and stopping video playback making, cut speed, ramping all the normal things that you’re doing when editing a video. In my experience, editing with this laptop is quite fast and I did not experience any slowdown or stutters when editing. h26, 510 bit footage for my Sony A7 s three and DaVinci Resolve while plugged in and only minimal stutters when on battery power where the laptop would sometimes stutter when playing back. The timeline, especially with high frame rate clips that had been edited and color graded. Thankfully there were literally zero hiccups when plugged in
and the laptop performed flawlessly. For context, too, I want you to know this laptop has been equipped with an I9 13 900 processor, 64 gigs of RAM and an Nvidia RTX 5080 GPU inside. So it is quite powerful. Now the second thing other than timeline performance that’s going to affect you as a video editor is how fast this laptop can export and render a video. To be clear, you’re going to spend significantly more time editing the video than rendering it. So the timeline speed is really what is important and that’s why we talked about it.
But the nice thing about rendering and exporting a video is that you have a timer that will tell you exactly how long rendering took, which is a great way to benchmark a laptop. In the case of the precision 5680, when I exported a four minute 4k wedding video with my left supplied an 8.264 at 100 megabits per second individual resolve. The video was exported in just 2 minutes and 7 seconds while plugged in, then remembering that the laptop is not going to perform as quickly when it comes to being on battery power as it is
when plugged in, exporting that same five minute 4K video file on battery power, the laptop took 3 minutes and 17 seconds. So as you can see, it is slower. But I was still consider 3 minutes quite respectable for rendering video. Now what happens whenever a laptop renders a video, everything heats up. The CPU and GPU are generating heat as they’re processing the video and this heat has to go somewhere. So Dell, of course, has to put fans in their laptop. But how are those fans going to sound to your ears? Are they pleasant fans to
listen to or are they unpleasant for context? With my Dell XPS 15 from 2018, I really hated how those fan sounded. They were really loud and high pitched and you could definitely tell a laptop was straining to cool itself while rendering. then came in my XPS 17. It had a larger chassis which gave it better cooling and the fans were tweaked as well to make them less loud and more appealing. But I still felt like they were running maxed out pretty much all the time. Whenever I was exporting or rendering a video with a precision
5680, it appears that Dell has tweaked these fans again and they sound lower in tone to my ears compared to the XPS 17, which is definitely more pleasant. More importantly, they don’t seem to run quite as often when editing a video. I found the fans to be running pretty consistently at about half speed when they were on, but it wasn’t very intrusive. It’s only when I went to to render a video that the fans would ramp up to full speed. So should you buy this laptop if your tossup is between the Dell 5680 or a
MacBook? I think that each have their pros and cons with the Dell having comparable build quality ports and speed. The Mac is still going to win on the battery life front. But in my opinion the Dell wins on the screen with an all weather looks fantastic and still has me wondering why Apple has not put something like this in their Macs. and like I said at the start of this review, in my opinion, this is one of the best PC laptops that you can buy today. And if you’re looking for an extremely powerful Windows laptop
for video editing, I think that Dell has crafted a stellar workstation here with a fantastic build, quality color, accurate screen that’s free of issues, good sounding speakers, accurate trackpad and above all internals that are capable of easily editing 4K video and the latest camera codecs. So the Dell 5680 is a fantastic choice for video editors. And you know what else is a fantastic choice? Downloading my edit videos like a pro guide. This guide is going to show you some most important things that took me years to learn as a video editor. And regardless of the
software that you use, you’re going to learn something from this guide. It’s completely free and you can download it at the link down below. Thanks so much for watching. Let me know in the comments down below what other videos you want to see me make and have a great day.
