Blender on Thinkpad W series

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1

I am looking at buying my first laptop. I have come to trust Lenovo laptops during my days working at a computer shop. The W series grabbed my attention due to it being top of the line for Lenovo, comes with a workstation video card and pretty cheap compare to other companies with similar hardware. The W530 is coming out soon, which will include the 3rd generation i7 processor. It’s definitely an Olympic size step up compare to my current Pentium D processor.

I am just curious, how well does Blender run on the W500 series laptops? Particularly the W520 since it’s the most recent version. I really like the new Cycles engine in Blender and I like to see a render with 500+ passes while not taking hours to render.

I seen how well it works on desktops, but I just don’t know how the mobile version holds up.

2

Blender runs great on my w520. Probably the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Because it has a Quadro card, it doesn’t suffer from the 2-sided lighting issue that Geforce cards have, so performance is solid.

That being said, I found that gpu rendering on my quadro 1000m is about equivalent to rendering on my i7-2600 series cpu that’s in the machine. So if you want to see real performance gains with GPU rendering, then I would suggest ponying up the extra cash for the quadro 2000m, or wait for the w530, which sports kepler cards… yum!