Getting a new laptop soon

I’m going to buy a new laptop soon when they go on sale next week. It’s so I can use it for a digital imaging class online. However I would like it to be able to run Blender too. So my question is

When looking for a new laptop what are some good aspects for a laptop that runs or uses Blender?

I’m not looking for an overly expensive laptop, just some expertise from those experienced when buying one. Feedback would be appreciated, thanks.

In the current era we live in every single new laptop in the planet is physically capable of running Blender at well over acceptable performance.

Just make sure it has Windows, or if you’re okay with spending a premium for a “pretty” shell then Mac. Avoid Chromebooks and other weird trash computers like the plague. They’re terribly designed and extremely cheap and intended for schools.

Best of luck. :slight_smile: I miss my 2011 Asus K53E. :’(

Check for a graphics card too. A “gamers” laptop comes at a premium, but if you can get a second hand one, it will be appreciated. At the moment, there are plenty of options for online storage of data, so Hard Drive is not an issue if you have regular access to wifi. It may pay if you check the “reviews” of where you buy the laptop, as some places are pretty tight when it comes to refunds and aftercare support.

The one I am looking at will have a terrabyte in the hardrive but the card is a I7 or something? I asked for a Nividia but it wasn’t in it. It’s a dell I think too. I need to make sure it has a numpad too.

Whatever you do make sure to check the BIOS/UEFI when in the shop to ensure that “secure boot” can be turned off by you? Why? If you ever want to switch from windows to linux you’ll likely need to turn secure boot off, and you probably want to keep the possibility of a switch of OS open for the future just incase windows 10 gets even worse.

Just my two cents:
As someone who does a lot of rendering and less hi-poly editing I prefer to sacrifice some CPU performance for a decent GPU. If you do a ton of modeling and almost no rendering then no dedicated GPU will be fine, however, if you are using Cycles (in my opinion) a decent GPU is a must. I would recommend Nvidia, anything above a 750ti would probably be sufficient and 1050ti+ would be great.

Good Luck and Happy Blending!

I bought a cheap laptop for work. Intel i5 7th Gen, Nvidia 970, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. It is fast enough to model a high poly car and then baking the textures to low poly version takes 1 hour.

I myself am using gaming laptop Asus ROG, I7 4720HQ, 32 GB ram, GTX 970M 3Gb ram. Well it is 4 years old and at the time it cost me about 2400$.Today it is not the best of best but it still does it’s job without any serious problems even in more complicated scenes. Question is what is your budget? As mentioned above today there are plenty of well equiped laptops on market so any gaming rig around 1000-1200$ will do the trick. What i would recommend is :

CPU - I5 (I7 if fits the budget)
RAM - 16 GB (ideally but can go with 8 if there is a budget limit)
GPU - whatever fits the budged like GTX 970M (ideally GTX 1050)
DISK - I would strongly recommend SSD (ideally SSD + HDD)

Brand doesn’t really matter in this budget but could mention : ASUS, MSI, LENOVO, ACER nitro, etc.