more advice please re: laptop v desktop and Unreal, Metahumans, Houdini, etc.

jmg07

Hi. There is a good post on specs for a new pc....

Upgrading or building a new PC? This is the thread for you!

My issues are:

1) I'm in the southern hemisphere where things are about 2 x the price of the US (I think that post refers to prices is in USD)
2) I'm looking at moving o/s in about 6-9 months.
3) I'm not a massive gamer, the device is for content creation and if I bought a laptop i'd hook it up to monitor or 2 with hdmi cables.

So i've found a 64gb ram, i9 10900kf and rtx3080 that is not badly priced all things considered and if I knew I would be staying put i'd buy it.
I have looked into shipping pcs overseas, taking them apart and putting them back together, etc. and not sure that's for me.

I'm prob going to have to settle for a laptop. I'm aware I won't get the performance of a pc - but I'm still struggling to get my head around how laptops perform - based on their specs. - doing day to day modelling, rendering, game dev, etc. And if it's even worth it. I did think about renting a pc but that ends up being the cost of buying one after about 4-5 months.

For example, my 3yo macbook pro with a quad core i7 @ 2.8Ghz and 16gb of ram has been pretty good up until recently. The graphics card is not great and consists of Radeon Pro 555 2 GB and Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB. 

It's handled Houdini sims ok and Unreal has run fine. But recently it's had issues running metahumans. And the SSD drive is geting maxed out and it's getting a bit annoying deleting things, putting them on external HD, etc.

I have seen a decently priced laptop that has:

• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3060 6GB GDDR6 graphics
• AMD Ryzen™ 9 5900HS processor (3.1 - 4.5GHz)
• 16GB RAM
  

Obviously not having at least 32gb ram is an issue but i don't really have a concept for how that laptop would handle the software i'm used to using.
Alternately, there are other laptops out there with a similar cpu. 32 gb of ram and a rtx 2080 card. Again, I don't have a good handle on how Unreal, etc. would run on these machines.

If I was to buy a decent desktop pc I feel relatively comfortable that even with advances in software i'd probably still get 3-5 years out of the pc. With a laptop I don't have a good sense of where things stand and am concerned that it just may not be able to deal with much other than basic content creation. Any advice would be great. 

Thanks

PolyHertz

If you're buying a laptop or desktop for making 3D art right now, you want at least 8GB of VRAM, 32GB of system RAM, and a CPU with a minimum of 6 cores (12 threads). That laptop you mentioned with the 2080 and 32GB of RAM should be fine. The 2080 is actually faster then the 3060 btw (not the 3060 Ti though).

poopipe

If you can pick up an Alienware a51m before they run out then do so. 

It's all desktop parts, slightly underclocked due to limited power .  I'm using one with a 10900k and a 2070super  as a workstation at the moment. It's handling the workload pretty well - I've been doing a lot of very large image and 3d data processing so it's been hammered pretty much all day, every day for 6 months or so.
It's not very portable (heavy plus it has 2 PSU blocks) and its definitely not cheap (£3500 ish at this spec I think)



Power (as in watts)  is the limiting factor in laptops and the naming of the GPUs  is a bit deceptive  - same with the 20 series.
Mobile 3060 is nowhere close to a desktop 3060 
That's not to say it won't work fine but check the specs (particularly the total bandwidth) rather than going by name 

jmg07

@poopipe thanks for the advice - the way the alienware's are put together makes decision making a bit difficult - for example the most expensive alienware a51m you can get (at least in my region) has the lastest i9 cpu, 64 gb 2993 ram but a 2080 super gpu. And then there are cheaper variations on the theme - an i7, 32gb 2666, but a 3080....but i'm guessing even though it's not the best - based on what you're saying, a 2080 super should prob get me through at lesst 6 - 12 months...i guess this is the cycle...people/articles on the net are intensely enthusiastic about the 30 series which makes sense - but i suppose if the 40 series comes out next year there'll be a 10-20% improvement over the 30 series and then every one wants that gpu. Unreal, Houdini, etc. obviously have minimum specs on their sites but it would be good if they showed on their websites different laptops/desktops with different specs running their software. Because it's not really feasible to buy high end of everything just to ensure you can work with their software and benchmarking websites with percentages, speeds, etc. doesn't easily correlate with real world experience.