I don’t have a technical question, but am getting a new computer soon and am currently making an animated series. I don’t need an all powerful supercomputer, just a fairly powerful laptop for gaming and working in Blender. What I’m working with isn’t super intensive, just Minecraft assets, but I want to be able to work so I can animate and play back at 60 FPS, as well as speed up my render times. I’m interested in a laptop, and something fairly affordable. What specs are good for Blender and which are the most important when buying a computer? All suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Just figured I’d ask the Blender community, as people working in stores just point you to the expensive stuff. Thanks!
if you want to gpu-render with cycles i recommend a nvidia card, as cycles still doesnt support all the features for amd cards. also one with at least 4gb of vram, as you need to fit your whole scene into that. as you’re buying a laptop you should go for the card that you need, and take whatever is delivered with it (cpu, ram, etc). if you can choose, have at least 8gb of ram (better 16), and a big enough ssd inside.
in my country the laptops with useful cards (geforce gtx 9xxM) start at about 1000 USD, and the ultra sick stuff with the gtx 10XX desktop! cards inside starts at about 1900USD.
if you want to spend less than 1000, maybe go for a card that has only 2gb’s. you may also look at what features arent supported yet with amd cards and go for one of those if you can live with its implications. amd cards have a tendency to have more vram than their nvidia counterparts.
anandtech.com is a good benchmark site to compare gpu performances (not sure about the M versions though)
Also, there does come a point where a cheaper laptop with a weaker GPU but an i7 XXXXHQ (The real quad core ones) end up faster at most rendering than some of the low -> mid range graphic cards found in laptops. Personally I would say get something with one of nVidias 10XXM GPU’s, they are a lot closer in performance to the desktop cards than previous 9XXM GPU’s were.
Here’s one on sale at Newegg (I don’t know much about US prices, live in Australia myself)
Has decent ram, proper CPU and a 1060 GPU