I am looking for a laptop for video editing and light gaming. I will be traveling across the country in September. I would like to be able to work in 4k video if possible. Not looking for a heavy gaming rig. I had previously owned a gaming desktop from Digital Storm, but they are bit overpriced.

Recommendations?

If you want to be able to work with 4k at anything approaching a reasonable speed, you're going to need the power that comes with a gaming machine.

I've got a new-ish laptop, a little over a year old and with its I7 and GTX780, I have a sneaking suspicion that it'd drag pretty hard if I was working in 4k. Regular 1080p rendering occasionally gives it fits.

What you are looking for is a high end workstation.  Which is obviously the opposite of a thin/light computer.  It is up to you to decide hoe much of a tradeoff you are willing to accept.

Personally I would go with the workstation, since they are cheaper and will work better than the alternative.

Workstation options:

Dell precision M4800

Configurable:

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m4800-workstation/pd?oc=cupmws4800w7p&model_id=precision-m4800-workstation

Fixed config:

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m4800-workstation/pd?oc=cap4800w7p204&model_id=precision-m4800-workstation

HP Zbook 15 G2

fixed configs:

http://www.provantage.com/hewlett-packard-hp-f1m32ut-aba~7HEWW5X9.htm

http://www.provantage.com/hewlett-packard-hp-f1m37ut-aba~7HEWW5XH.htm


This is the alternative to the workstation:

http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade

Just some thoughts. Subject to opinion...

Youre going to need to clarify something for us. Work "in" 4k video? You'll need a 5k screen for that (4k + toolbars) and some serious horse power. Its not just decoding the 4k video, but, unless you pre-render it, each video effect change will have to be applied to each frame as its played at 30 or 60fps.

Work "with" 4k video means you can get an i3 or i5 in a $700 laptop with a large hard drive (probably more important for video while travelling than the CPU) and be fine. Your renders will take longer than they would with a workstation CPU or GPU encoding but its the sort of thing you can start, go take a shit, have dinner (or vice versa), then come back and watch. Actually scrubbing through the video and grading it will take place at 12.5% of the original resolution (user configurable, but probably 1/8th) and is stupid easy. A $1k MS Surface would yawn at that. To that end, I would value an SSD over a hard drive more than an i7 over an i5. The i3 was to illustrate a point. Dont get an i3.

Games, on the other hand, can be a different story. I can't speak for AMD mobile graphics, but any nVidia card (6/7/8/9)50m or higher should be okay. I can do GTA5 on my 3 year old i7 with a 650m. Its not as pretty as my desktop but hey. If youre doing something more casual, you may be able to stick with the Intel integrated graphics. They're not amazing but they're better than people expect.

Of course, more power is almost always better. Depending on how often you do video editing, I would err on the side of less power otherwise youre going to need your power brick or a car battery everywhere. Start with a quad core i5 and go from there. 8GB memory min but 16 would be more ideal though also getting into workstation-laptop-land. All video goes to scratch disks so the memory doesnt really get torn up until render time. 256GB SSD depending on how much software youre bringing, too, and how long your videos are.