Hey guys,
I’m completely new in the world of CGI and have now decided to start this journey. However, I need a new laptop before I begin. I don’t have a super big budget, but I was thinking about purchasing this one. From what I have read, it should be sufficient. I’d still love it though, if one of you more experienced Blender users could confirm before I pull the trigger. Any help would be very appreciated.
Thank you in advance!
Spec wise it’s should be pretty good, however, I do not recommend getting anything from Lenovo. Lenovo is very poor quality. One of my relatives who has a Lenovo has to change out the cooling fan like once a year. Even after the laptop was first bought (a few years ago) it would randomly shutdown, lock files, and we had to replace the hard drive once already. Lenovo and HP have some of the poorest quality products I’ve seen.
I’d recommend something more like the Alienware m17 R5. Dell and ASUS have much higher quality and longer lasting products.
Thanks for the heads up Daniel, I appreciate that. One last thing though. Could I get your quick general opinion on the Razor Bade PCs too? They might be a bit outside my budget for the moment, but I don’t mind waiting and saving up, if that’s what it takes.
It looks like a good machine, this Lenovo, at least specs wise. As far as the reliability is concerned, I feel like laptops are hard to judge. I have had bad experience with Asus, I’ve seen good experiences with HP, and now running Lenovo without an issue to speak of. I’ve seen some poor machines from Dell, but some good too.
As for Razer, can’t speak of the newest generation that has just been released, but the previous, sharp edge design used to have a battery issue. Apparently, after about a year worth of use the battery inside would bloat. It has been an issue for years and was a reason why I chose not to buy their laptop this time. One cool feature of the Razer is that you could buy an external GPU dock and connect it to the laptop, but only if you went with an Intel processor. That is quite a USP.
I have no experience with Razor PCs so I can’t really say. Maybe someone else here has experience with them and could tell you more.
Also, if you do get Dell or ASUS and you can afford a bit more, I’d recommend getting Dell’s 4 year extended warranty or ASUS’s 3 year extended warranty. I can’t tell you how many electronics I’ve had the broke just a couple days after the 1 year warranty expired. 
Yeah, laptops in general just aren’t very good. LOL
Although, I have a ASUS laptop with about half the specs of someone’s HP laptop and someone else’s Lenovo and mine runs way better than both. In fact, straight out of the box the HP laptop and Lenovo barely worked. (the ASUS was also way cheaper than both the other laptops)
I think sometimes it’s probably just a hit and miss.
Too bad… once the original idea of IBM ThinkPads was THE machines to use… ( with later HP the only notebooks in space/erth orbit ) and some years after using the Lenovo name it started to fall…
(Sadly my old ThinkPad R61 with 1680x1050 may have died some weeks ago… 
)
Not so sure about Asus anymore. At the very least, avoid the ROG line like it’ll burn your SSD to a crisp. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it definitely got toasty enough to damage mine after less than a year.
That piece of garbage would get hot enough to burn to touch just having a web browser open, and that’s while running fans like a jet engine and plugged into a power source. Abominably poor heat management is apparently a “known issue” with the ROG line. I didn’t even bother with the warranty because my faith in the hardware was so shaken I just wanted to replace the whole thing with something I could count on. (Color accuracy was terrible too).
Yep. Hence the reason to get an extended warranty. Electronics just aren’t very long lasting tbh.
This is what my biggest fair is and always has been! As a Mac-boy switching over to PC, the ocean of choices/combinations & opinions with my lack of “know how” is SO crippling. I think I’m gonna have to go with a desktop after all and just get whatever the guy in the store recommends. Otherwise I’ll never get started. But thank you all for the inputs.
The ROG laptop didn’t last long enough to need an extended warranty. If I had reason to believe mine was defective, I’d have gone through the warranty process, but based on other users’ reviews it looks like the entire Asus ROG line is engineered so poorly they’re basically all defective and the problem is just going to come back. I’d rather chalk it up to a pricey lesson learned about trusting Asus hardware just because they used to be good. Even with good backups, I don’t want to rely on hardware that has proven it will fail because it is not engineered to function safely.
I do recognize beefy laptops do typically run hotter and louder than less beefy ones, but this wasn’t that. This thing ran super hot just trying to run the OS, even with no other software competing for resources.
I have AMD legion 5 Lenovo laptop, with 2060 Nvidia 6GB Vram. 15" screen. Filled it to 64GB RAM and 2x TB drives. Works great, with Pop! OS for already 2 years. In that period repasted it once and cleaned dust from fans. maybe 3-4 times. As you have 3 modes, if you prefer cooler, set to Quiet one, with shortcut combo. CPU does not go over 90degrees when rendering. GPU is around 70 when rendering with Octane. I do use deskop for final renderings though. I also had Dell XPS, much better screen, but harder to keep cooler. Still works but battery dead. And ASUS Rog, from 2017. That one died after 3 years. GPU died.
The laptop is not very convenient for working with 3d graphics, I write because I have such experience. But if you decide, you can take any (HP has been working for me since 2006, but this is just an example), but you need to take it with a real video card, since gpu rendering is faster. If you don’t make complex and millions of scenes, then 4 cores will do, but for rendering, I recommend taking a video card of at least 4 gigabytes, since 2 is not always enough for me. There is no point in discussing the company, since now everything is assembled at a high level. But in general, I worked on a laptop for 1.5-2 years - tolerable!)
Wait, how does that make sense? The purpose of extended warranty is so that if anything breaks you can just send it in and they have to fix or replace it for free. It doesn’t prevent the device from breaking, it just makes it so you don’t have to pay to have it repaired/replaced.
I’m thinking extended as in “extended coverage time” (ex. three year warranty instead of one year) but I now think you’re thinking extended as in “covers an extended range of hardware problems, such as accidents”
I think we’re getting off topic though so I’m going to stop talking about my bitterness towards ROG and my newfound distrust in Asus quality.
Purchased an entry level gamer chassis Gigabyte R7 K1 17.3" laptop last year, in order to run current 3.x.x version/s for various game asset projects I’ve had in mind completing this year.
Initial thinking was just as a mobile platform to enable working whilst on the go so at the moment it’s held up under the load plus also since I’d let my SPainter and MT4 licences lapse due too lack of funds, therein having to generate everything natively although lately, noticed that the standard shipped 16GB RAM is causing slight processing overhead which I guess means an upgrade at some point soon, whether 32 or 64GB RAM kit.
Now if you’re located Stateside, I think a couple of viable budget conscious options might be of interest i.e.
2022 MSI GE76 Raider 17.3" - $2000USD
or
2022 ASUS ROG Strix G17 17.3" - $1889USD
Both, also ship with a GeForce RTX3060 GPU, 2TB SSD plus 64GB RAM.
https://www.reinisfischer.com/top-20-laptops-64gb-ram-gaming-business
EDIT:
…ah after reading Nanoglyph’s comments, possibly that ROG may not be up to scratch, as I had thought.
Usually I don’t have a clue about specs etc, I just see some models within the price range I am interested in, and view some videos on Youtube. If they are able to run some of the current games it means that they can handle Blender as well.
However this is up to a point, you would have some level of performance, and you will be quite good in general terms, but also you must set a hard limit of how much performance you can get.
The secret is to pay exactly what you plan to use and what you will actually use.
If for example your only aim is have triple-A and complex scenes, you need to double check that you can work quite easy in such files. If you are able to ask other users who have the same laptop it would be the best case.
https://cloud.blender.org/p/gallery/5eff317d7920214fcfa0770e
On the other hand, if you just want to start learning, and make your first steps. Is a simple and minimal process you won’t have any trouble to work with a simple and humble laptop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efRA1eeos9g
I’ve never had a loptop, buy if I were to buying a PC nowadays for 3D modeling, I’d asked myself: what kind of renders am I gonna do? Is it gonna be look more like realistic one or rather low poly/cartoon? I think that one question could help save a lot of money.