Laptop advice

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1

Hi everybody, not sure whether that’s the place to ask for hardware advice but I’ll go ahead and please moderators feel free to move this thread elsewhere if needed.

I’m on the search for a laptop on which I’ll be doing mostly 2D graphics, and some blendering as well, but nothing heavy -I’ll probably use the regular workstation for “heavy” rendering. The laptop will be my “on the go” workstation.
I’ve heard MSI laptops are usually very reliable, and my friend has a Lenovo which seems to be well-built too, but my question is really more about the choice of graphics card and processor : I’m completely out of the loop… I’ve heard wonders about Ryzen processors but do they even work hand in hand with Nvidia cards ? Or should I go with an AMD card ? My biggest concern is the laptop overheating and making noise. I thought going for a midrange card would keep the machine quiet (RTX2060 maybe even lower). Once again, I don’t need top of the range, just something capable -and I’ll be changing from a GTX970 so it’ll probably be an improvement over it anyway.

My graphic work also calls for a screen that’s not too terrible color-wise, but it doesn’t need to be perfectly calibrated either : I have two monitors to take care of the fine-tuning. My budget is around 1200e, give or take 100e.

If anyone has first-hand experience or can link to reliable benchmarks, I’ll be very grateful.

Thanks !

Hadrien

2

Laptops are the worst when it comes to on the go CGI… If you do anything which requires a capable GPU you need something with a lot of Battery Life to it…
I recommend Alienware Laptops all the way (do a custom build!.. if you don’t need the best GPU, then go with something lower which saves more on battery life)… The only laptop that lasted minimum 1 hour when doing GPU heavy work… anything else I have had died under 30 minutes. Next in line is MacBook Pro.

3

I’ll look into those. Last I heard though, they were said to be really overpriced. I’ll try their configurator and see.

Thanks !!

4

or simply NB with 4800h if you use CPU rendering

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or 4800h + RTX 2060

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if you use GPU rendering

you can run for example corona render bench on your current desktop https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark and compare with result of 4800H if you have in desktop ryzen 3700H or low - it show almost same result which i think for laptop “not bad” https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results/cpu/4800h

and if you plan render on GPU - RTX is must have

5

Choice of X86 processor has little to do with with the graphics card. All that matters is that PCI-express devices are supported. It’s a standardized bus.

AMD and Intel processors both use PCI-e. So no worries there. Last time AMD was using AGP for expansion cards was Athlon 64 days IIRC, so well over 15 years ago now.

Current AMD cpu architecture is really great for battery life so if you intend to use the laptop as a portable carry then it’s definitely a really good choice.

6

Thanks for the advice. Do you have personal experience with MSI laptops ?

@Felix_Kutt thanks. I thought there were some incompatibilities, good to know there’s no reason to worry. Maybe I’m going for an AMD processors then, and an Nvidia card. If I remember correctly GPU acceleration is still way behind for AMD graphics cards yeah ?

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Yeah, nVidia is better for GPU rendering in blender.