Puget Mobile 17" Portable Workstation review: Workstation power in a laptop

The Puget Mobile 17" laptop has desktop workstation power in a portable setup, and can handle pretty much anything thrown at it. Is this monster of a laptop great for editors, VFX designers, graphic artists, and others?

Puget Mobile 17" specifications

Puget Systems put a lot of power into its $3800 and up portable workstation. Video and film editors, content creators, animators, graphic designers, visual effects maestros, and others won't have to worry that the laptop won't be able to keep up with the demands of their projects, especially as they continue to push the envelope.

The Puget Mobile 17" laptop we reviewed included these specs and features:

• Puget Mobile Core HM770 C170-G (Intel) with a Puget Systems C170-S motherboard.
• 2x Kingston SODIMM DDR5-5600 48GB.
• Integrated NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile 16GB.
• Kingston KC3000 1TB Gen4 M.2 SSD (primary drive).
• Kingston KC3000 1TB Gen4 M.2 SSD (secondary drive).
• Windows 11 Pro 64-bit.

The cool thing is you can customize a Puget Mobile laptop to your own specifications, so there is a lot of room for even more power. This spec comes in at $4128.

Additionally, we installed VEGAS Pro 22 and Cinebench R23 to test the hardware.

Putting the Puget Mobile 17" through the paces

To test the speed and power of the Puget Mobile 17”,  we did some Key tests including running CINEBENCH 2024 and did some cutting in VEGAS Pro 22 with various clips, from 1080p to 8K RED footage.  

CINEBENCH 2024 Results

• 22809 pts. score for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU.
• 1073 pts. score for via the 24C/32T@ 2.42 GHz Intel Core I9-14900 multicore CPU.
• 121 pts. score for single core CPU performance.
• 8.88 x MP Ratio.

Next up, we did some tests in VEGAS Pro 22 with clips of varying resolution, including 1080p, 4K, and RED 8K footage, all at 23.98 fps. The 8K clip was just under 17 seconds and came in at a massive 3GB!

For one test, we created a new timeline matching the clip's settings to see how VEGAS and ultimately the Puget Mobile 17" would handle the footage individually. We'd do some color grading, check playback, etc. All three clips did well individually, although the playback was at 1080p24, which is okay by us. We also mixed footage in one timeline at 4K/23.98 fps and again, no problems.

While in VEGAS Pro 22, we rendered and exported the 8K 23.98 fps RED clip (just under 17 seconds) into a ProRes XQ clip (4096 x 2160 23.98 fps) and it took 29 seconds and gave us a 13GB video file. (Under normal circumstances, we would have gone with a standard ProRes clip or even down-converted to 4K.)

While the Puget Mobile 17” is a blazing fast monster, it comes with a crutch: When performing CPU- and GPU-intense tasks, such as running CINEBENCH 2024 or rendering a 4K project, the fans kick on to the extent you can hear them whirring away from another room. If you’re working in a virtual filmmaking volume or anywhere on set or on location, that sound could be an issue.

Conclusion

The Puget Mobile 17" laptop delivers on the promise of workstation power in a portable setup. It handled everything we threw at it and then some. There is plenty of upside with this powerful machine, but the size and weight of the laptop and charger can be tricky when carrying it in the field. However, you can get a case with wheels to keep your back happy.