Our house was robbed today (yay f***ing baltimore) so now I need a new laptop. As I make models and animations for use in XNA and thus need the fbx exporter, 2.5 is of little use to me (or so I’m told). So, does anyone know what is a pretty good laptop for 2.49b now and 2.5whatever in the future when it’s into betas and working a little better? I’d like to keep it around 700 but will bump to a grand if neccesary. finally, if no one has any direct model# sugestions, what should I look for? My previous had a core2 duo and 2g ram, and lagged horribly and had the display issues with background occlusion and never showed b (box) lines or anything. Should I look for a high ram count? video card? is multiple cores better? I won’t be doing a whole lot of rendering, so that’s not a huge issue. Thanks for your help.
What you should look for in a good computer (if you know a bit about computers)
Specifically for laptops you should look for (as you said) a lot of RAM mainly, a good graphics card if you do a lot of GLSL or game rendering stuff (I would suggest you look for Nvidia cards as ATI can have many problems with graphics display), a decent processor is always good. Multi-cores is better indeed but not needed unless you want to do multi-tasking (which you probably want to do)
I think that is the most needed parts, the rest is not that important for a graphical artist.
Though you probably want to have good cooling for your laptop, buy an external extra cooler if needed.
And sorry to hear about you getting robbed, I hope that everything sorts out for you man 
Thank you sir for your suggestions. Quick question, which NVidia card would you look for? Thanks!
Hi there, i am looking for a blender ready laptop myself and found the following search criteria:
good cpu
quadcore intel i7 would be the best
nice graphics card
definetly Nvidia, Ati users report some trouble in blender, also Nvidia has cuda, and with all the gpu based
rendering coming up i guess that this will be quite useful.
A list of cuda gpus can be found here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html
alot of ram
but not too much, win 32 but can only use up to 3gb, 64 bit versions can handle more.
Windows also has a threshold on how much memory one application may use before it is terminated,
2gb at default, and up to 3 when you tweak it. so there is no need for more than 4 gb.
The laptop that i found that meets these requirements, for a reasonable price is the Asus G60J .
it has a nice i7 quadcore, a nvidia GTX 260M, which has cuda and a really nice overall performance.
Review and stats here:http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-G60J-Gaming-Notebook.22357.0.html
notebookcheck is a great site, i spent hours looking through this benchmark list here:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html trying to find a nice card for a good price, i believe the gtx 260m is a good choice.
Tepending on the price this thing retails for in your region it might just be in your budgetrange. Its a litte to expensive for me now, but i will get me this puppy one day
Check out my comment here http://blenderartists.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1659404&postcount=28
Originally Posted by <b>Minifig</b> [](http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1614788#post1614788) <i>I just purchased this laptop: [http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+L...&skuId=9736955](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Laptop+with+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B+i5+Processor+-+Blue/Black/9736955.p?id=1218164036446&skuId=9736955)
Thanks everyone for your help and advice! :yes:
I recently got the last one from Best Buy about 3 days ago. Great hackintosh (got the info at http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/ind…owtopic=219591), great performance (hope to get gtx 480m mxm card), i5 up to i7 (search results page 2 here:http://gog.is/asus/g60jx/upgrade/i5/to/core/i7 source reports: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus…-possible.html) and gpu upgradability (no sources yet).
I might upgrade the LCD to Dell XPS 16 RGB-LED HD.
Getting a nice NVidia card is the most important thing because if you have problems in Blender because of a graphics card, then nothing else will even work let alone render fast.
The second most important thing is the processor. Usually, you’ll start to see that there is a huge price jump when you go from one processor speed to another. So just get the fastest one you can find for your money and once you think you have the right processor, then do research on it and make sure its reviews don’t point out troubles.
The thing most important thing is RAM. Make sure that you have extra RAM slots for upgrading your RAM later. Some laptops really limit you in how much the maximum RAM capacity is. You might consider spending the money you have now on a nice motherboard/processor/video card combination and then upgrade the RAM later.
Once you have decided on those things, then think about other features that you want. I have a built in SD card reader and a PCMCIA slot built in that I use to upload video data with. I also have S-video out and SVGA out for sending my signal to TV’s and projectors. I also have a firewire port so that I can use my nice audio breakout box and also so I can capture video over firewire from video cameras.
Peace.