Best blender laptop?

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

I’m looking to get a new laptop. While I do play some games, blender has proved more stressful on my old laptop than the games have. My main requirements are that the video card needs to be Nvidia (I’ve had bad experiences with ati), at least 2 gigs of ram, minimum of 100GB Hard Drive, and at least a 1GHz processor. It also needs to include a full 17 key num-pad. The price needs to be around $1000.

I am currently looking at this laptop: Alienware M17x

It has good specs for the price and looks really cool. So my questions are:

  1. Is this a good laptop for blender?
  2. Is there a different laptop you think would be better?

I am fully open to suggestions!

[edit] Thanks for all of your help!
I just purchased this laptop: 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
:slight_smile:

2

Well, in terms of computers in general, blender uses CPU for alot of it. The laptop your looking at is a gaming laptop, which means it has better graphics card. Games do use CPU and graphics, but it’s not solely dependent on CPU. For Blender, which uses almost none of the graphics card, that’s a bit of a waste. If you do GPU rendering in Blender, then you are using the graphics card, but other wise it’s the CPU it’s rendering with. I can’t really suggest any laptop because I don’t know what your looking for, but I know there are better ones than this.

Hope this helps.

3

Macbook pro is a great laptop, although, because it doesn’t support Direct X, you aren’t going to be able to run Martinsh’s filters. Most everything works. If you want another laptop of similar quality, you are essentially going to pay around the same price, give or take a hundred dollars.

Just don’t get a Dell.

4

I did forget to mention that I use blender for game design, not animation rendering, so the graphics card is fairly important.

I would rather not get a Mac, simply because many of my games I play are not Mac compatible. May I ask why you believe I should not get a Dell? I’ve heard it is a very reputable brand…

Thanks guys for the suggestions, keep em coming!

5

I would rather not get a Mac, simply because many of my games I play are not Mac compatible. May I ask why you believe I should not get a Dell? I’ve heard it is a very reputable brand…

If you get a Dell, you will experience the worst, and I mean worst any PC can offer you. There has never been an instance in which I haven’t had to fight one to get it to do some of the most simple tasks such as playing DVDs or opening up Internet Explorer.

My friend has, thus far, had been well treated with a Sony Viao. Despite a couple of shortcomings (and a generally short battery life), it is a very good computer.

In the end, make sure that your computer has a battery life longer then four hours, a processor faster then 2.3 ghz, and about 3gbs of RAM.

6

I am sorry that you have had bad experiences with Dell. :frowning:

Anyway, I found that the alienware laptop did not have a full num-pad built-in and, therefore, has been scratched off my blender laptop list.

I am still looking for a laptop with Nvidia graphics, a full num-pad, and a good processor. All for around $1000.

7

I have used an Alienware laptop for Blender before at college(I borrowed it) and it works really well. Most laptops don’t have numpads, so it’s no biggie, really. The only hard thing about Alienware is that you have to open the cd drive from the computer. I think yournamehere was being a bit dramatic, they aren’t that bad. Opening Internet Explorer isn’t hard, just click the icon(duh?).

8

Yeah you need to watch out for that.

9

watch out for what?

10

Hello,
I’m interested in this thread… I was looking for a good laptop to use blender (and with some gaming heheh :D). I was tempted by the latest arrivals with core i3/i5 or i7 620M cpus, I think these processors should be enough for light rendering.

I was trying to consider laptops equipped with the latest radeon hd5650 mobile… I saw on ATI website that opengl 3.2 support is going to be released this year (probably the lates 10.3 drivers already supports that). Is there anyone here already using this mobile vga with blender?

There are any adviced integrated vga’s that work good with blender? I ask this because I had issues using blender with discrete desktop graphics (mainly with nvidia 8800GT) and I could try in the past a notebook with a nvidia 8200M and… well it couldn’t handle much more than few polygons.

11

Is there any websites that allow you to build your own personalized laptop ?

12

the lack of numpad was easily solved for me and my netbook by buying a £5.99 usb plug in numpad :slight_smile: the only issue is occasionally I have to hit numlock on it to “remind” the netbook what’s going on, but it’s a really minor woe. This option really opens up the field for you, laptop wise!

~P~

13

Yes. There are many sites on the net that allow you to customize your laptop. Alienware.com is an excelant example. :wink:

14

just make sure you have an NVIDIA gpu and a decent CPU and you will be fine.
ati had very bad opengl support in the past and i doubt that has changed much, intel gpu = lots of troubles:O

15

i want to buy this lab top, please tell me more about it I have listen a lot about, it how can I get them, tell me some useful sites in this regards.

16

i did a quick search for laptops with “good” resolution and a NVIDIA card, seems these are hard to find these days but when you really want a laptop to work with and be a bit future proof, one of these this would be my choice. in fact i would take the asus, it has a bit a smaller screen but i guess all the sonys have the reflective screen which i dont like at all:eyebrowlift2:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=Property&N=2034940032%205011%20103980226%204802%204804&PropertyCodeValue=398%3A16356%2C398%3A40014%2C398%3A14800%2C398%3A6696%2C398%3A6691%2C398%3A15467%2C398%3A6692%2C398%3A47205%2C398%3A6694%2C398%3A39989%2C398%3A48346%2C398%3A44336%2C400%3A6722%2C400%3A40986%2C402%3A49572%2C402%3A49716%2C402%3A46992%2C402%3A48903%2C402%3A49591%2C402%3A48928%2C402%3A54307%2C402%3A55445%2C402%3A49581%2C402%3A53929%2C402%3A48515%2C402%3A53954%2C402%3A14213%2C402%3A53986%2C402%3A14801%2C402%3A55207%2C402%3A14762%2C402%3A45542%2C402%3A21488%2C402%3A45551%2C402%3A49211%2C402%3A45112%2C402%3A29027%2C402%3A55132%2C402%3A40023%2C402%3A54228%2C402%3A35531%2C402%3A40028&bop=And&CompareItemList=32%7C34%2D127%2D055%5E34%2D127%2D055%2DTS%2C34%2D220%2D700%5E34%2D220%2D700%2DTS%2C34%2D127%2D056%5E34%2D127%2D056%2DTS%2C34%2D127%2D050%5E34%2D127%2D050%2DTS%2C34%2D127%2D051%5E34%2D127%2D051%2DTS

17

What? Those filters are GLSL which Macbooks absolutely support. Blender doesn’t even use DirectX on Windows.

18

I’ve been using ATI gpus with blender and windows without any issue until now (hd4850, hd4670, hd5770 and now an hd5850). I had to give up nvidia right for the total incompatibility with opengl that happened with the 8800gt (it wasn’t neither able to accelerate a cube in blender…).

Unfortunately most of those notebooks are not yer available here in italy and they’ll cost a lot more than what $ can buy… then nvidia integrated cars are practically the same since the 9000 mobility series (gt 200’s and 300 are literally the same gpus) and it’s hard to find them in conjunction with a decent price, that’s why I was looking after the hd 5650…

19

hm thats a good point, since the 200/300 mobile cards are all rebranded 8000/9000 series its probably better to get a ati 5xxx serie which outperforms the nvidia chips by a lot. maybe someone with such a laptop can comment if he gets problems with opengl and such a card.

20

Thanks for Sharing…:evilgrin: