What kinds of laptops do you all use? Which brand runs Blender best nowadays?
Moved thread from #support:technical-support to #general-forums:blender-and-cg-discussions.
A lot of that answer has to do with how you do it. Particularly, do you use Cycles or EEVEE? Some recent laptops are engineered to be “very thin,” and they might not even contain an internal fan. Which is fine for writing documents and web-surfing, but not for anything which could generate heat, as some types of rendering will do very quickly. Even if your laptop does contain a fan, the air-flow is still comparatively obstructed. Some laptops just can’t cool themselves, because their designers envisioned that they would never actually need to. (And very often this is the case.)
Cycles uses the GPU as a math coprocessor, and it can drive the chip far more intensely than even “game playing” would do. That becomes heat. EEVEE uses the same hardware in a completely different and generally less-intense way, but that can be “hot” too.
In a “tower” unit, you have room to put in perhaps more-than-one fan, and to put heat-sink structures on top of the chips (sometimes with their own fans). And, yes, “liquid-cooled” units still do exist. Somehow, you’ve got to get rid of the heat, because semiconductors do not like to be hot and they will fail quickly.
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To echo @sundialsvc4 - Blender doesn’t do well on laptops generally. You can run Blender on a good laptop but cooling issues will almost always be a problem. You’ll also struggle to find a laptop with enough RAM. Laptops are lower on RAM, and you need a minimum of 16 GB RAM to use Blender. I personally won’t use less than 48 with Blender, and my preference is 64. Most laptops have 4 or 8, and putting one level of subdivision on a character will fill up 4 GB of RAM (more or less).
If you’re looking for a new computer for the purpose of using Blender, you should build a tower 
From what I can tell, it seems that the main issue is heat (explains why my laptop has yet to collapse). I really don’t want to get a PC tower, so does anyone know a laptop that
- Has a fan
- Meets the minimum Blender operating requirements (which, josephhansen, I thought minimum was 8GB of RAM, according to https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/)
- Is a laptop
I’m not really looking at using complex 3D models. I use Blender more for 2D animating than I do 3D animating. Unless grease pencil strokes become as complicated as sculpted heads tomorrow morning, I don’t actually need too much computing power.
Hi, all depends on you budget, for 800 € you get a small gaming laptop with RTX 3060 for example: Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-55-521N) - 15,6" 144Hz Full HD IPS, Intel i5-10300H, 16GB RAM
For 1500 €: GIGABYTE AORUS 15P XD-73DE224SO - 15,6" FHD 240Hz, Intel i7-11800H, 16GB RAM with RTX 3070
This should work really well for Blender.
What other user mention about tower PC, a laptop gain about 50-60% less performance of a tower PC for the same money, it is really so simple.
Cheers, mib
These seem like good choices to try out, so I’ll try buying one when the performance of my current laptop becomes truly unusable. Though, one more question. If I were animating with macOS and suddenly switched to windowsOS, would I still be able to access the files?
Yes, .blend files are universal for all OS, except Amiga OS I fear.
Cheers, mib
For daily work, I use a recent Apple MacBook Pro, and I will be free to say that I do not like many of the recent design decisions that this company has made with their hardware. I have engineered my workflows around EEVEE (still wishing for Blender Internal (BI) to come back …), because Cycles is functionally unavailable to me – due entirely to heat. (And of course because I can have learned to accomplish everything that I need to do, for my requirements, using EEVEE: I do not require Cycles to get my job done.)
The most recent MacBook pros handle blender quite well without overheating or loud fan noise. That said, in terms of raw performance per dollar you will undoubtedly have more luck on a windows laptop if you don’t mind some fan noise and short-ish battery life.
The M1 MacBook Pro’s are a complete game-changer in that regard. Even when rendering in Cycles mine hardly heats up, and the fan is only barely audible. Battery life does also not drop instantly when rendering like it did with previous ones.
16GB RAM is my personal minimum, you can technically run Blender on a computer not much better than a Tamagotchi but I personally find 16 GB to be a safer threshold
RAM is the one thing in the computer that, by definition, is “just as fast as the CPU,” and that CPU can only directly process data which is there. When I buy a new computer, I reflexively ask how much RAM it can hold. If I know that I will be doing resource-hungry projects like rendering or music, I’d rather have “more RAM” than a “faster CPU,” because it does you no good to be driving a Lamborghini on a crowded highway.
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For a laptop that will run Blender reasonably well I would simply make sure it has a dedicated graphics card and a min of 16 gig of ram. For mostly 2D animation work I would think this should be fine. I would guess any newer model of laptop would have a very fast CPU.
I am running Blender on a year old mid range Dell laptop with no major issues. Eevee and Cycles X run well and it’s fine for basic modelling and animating but I wouldn’t want to do any big renders on it. For very heavy intense work I am on the tower work station. But optimising scenes and assets is very good practice and discipline to get into anyway.
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