I need some suggestions for a good laptop for 3d work and to work with Oculus

David-J

Hi everyone.

I'm going to be moving around in the near future so I need a laptop solution for my 3d work. I bought a Lenovo some time ago and it was great but I am looking for a new one.

Things I'm looking for. 

- Works with high poly meshes in zbrush
- Good performance with Maya, 3ds max and the likes.
- And also to be compatible with the Oculus Rift coming out, so beefy enough that can run it.

Suggestions?

ZacD

Get one of the laptops with a desktop GTX 980, there's a few of them, I think Linus Tech Tips has reviewed some of them. I don't think any laptop M GPU is equivalent to a desktop GTX 970. 

David-J

@ZacD I'll look into that. Didn't know that even existed. I checked on some sites comparing the 980M to 970 and there is a gap but that is the closest I think.

PolyHertz

I would be careful about choosing any of the new laptops with desktop 980s in them. Just about every laptop I have ever seen with desktop cpus eventually had overheating issues, which makes the prospect of desktop gpus in laptops seem like a bad idea for anyone who upgrades less then once every 2 years.

JedTheKrampus

If anything is going to work well for VR, it'll be something that you can hook up an external GPU to, like this: https://www.msi.com/product/notebook/GS30-2M-Shadow.html

You can avoid a lot of the thermal problems this way, although the dock requires an external monitor so it's not really very portable in the end.

David-J

Cool. That looks pretty sick. That would work but like you said, it ends being not very portable.

monster

I'd be weary of laptops for VR. Wish I could say more about the requirements for the 1.0 SDK, but can't.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/

Note that almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the recommended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance.

JedTheKrampus

I just don't think it's very practical right now to do VR stuff on a laptop. But, of all the laptops I've seen around, that's probably the best one for this particular use case.