Desktop Replacement Laptops
polycounter lvl 9
Hey there guys,
I wanted to ask what would you guys recommend, of all high-end laptops out there (and coming in the very near future), for a 3D Artist?
Let me quell the laptop vs. desktop debate right now in stating that, I must have a laptop, because I must be mobile. I want to have that flexibility.
So with that considered, I've been looking at the coming ASUS G75 and a few others. I definitely want the new Ivy Bridge proc's and a Kepler architecture GPU....
What do you guys suggest? My price range is about ~$2500, and will be buying by May of this year.
I'm very curious to hear what you guys think!
I wanted to ask what would you guys recommend, of all high-end laptops out there (and coming in the very near future), for a 3D Artist?
Let me quell the laptop vs. desktop debate right now in stating that, I must have a laptop, because I must be mobile. I want to have that flexibility.
So with that considered, I've been looking at the coming ASUS G75 and a few others. I definitely want the new Ivy Bridge proc's and a Kepler architecture GPU....
What do you guys suggest? My price range is about ~$2500, and will be buying by May of this year.
I'm very curious to hear what you guys think!
Replies
The new ones are rumored to have the Ivy Bridge processors, but I can't comment on the graphics architecture, but even my 2010 MacBook Pro can hold its own while working in 3DS Max with high (>1 million) poly models.
It may be more expensive than the competition, and it may have its haters, but for a high-end, practical, resilient laptop, you'd have a hard time searching for a better machine than a top-end MacBook Pro.
(not talking to you Tom)
Heck my current model has an ATI 6750 card an I still haven't seen a single problem in either Windows or OS X.
If a MacBook Pro with a retina display hits this year, I'm gonna go nuts, that shit will be incredible.
Agree with R_Fletch_R too, no point in another Mac vs PC debate. I built a PC last year which was super fast and pretty cheap, nothing bad about it at all, but I ended up selling it since I just always went back to my MacBook plugged into a display.
Yeah they're expensive, probably way overpriced in fact, but they're awesome.
this basically.
just don't buy ram from apple, they overcharge it a lot.
"A 2880x1800 pixel display would have a density of about 220 pixels per inch at a 15.4" size,"
hating apple rn, my 15" mbpro is less than a year old :<
Yeah my '11 has Thunderbolt. Although as great as the tech itself is, there seems to be little you can use it for other than the Apple Display which, whilst very nice, is incredibly expensive.
I think there might be a few things trickling out now though, although it's still an expensive technology it seems.
I think cinema displays are reasonably priced given their quality. same level alternatives cost roughly the same, and better options by nec/eizo are in $2k + price range.
you also can hook up this thing by lacie through thunderbolt - http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549
but 400 bucks for 1 TB hdd is excessive
Plus one for the OPs prefference for Asus. Why pay out the ass for those horrible glossy screens on a mac where you can see your own reflection when you can get a 3D screen with built in IR for the same price? Plus you can get a ton of RAM and a great card in it if your willing to spend a little.
Dunno if I would wait around for Ivy Bridge. Isn't their main benefit over Sandy Bridge just power consumption? Or does it multithread better to any significant degree.
Check the design - ones that have a NVidia Fireplace 9000 or above 2mm under your left palm can be tricky to deal with, and painful if you leave metal things near the exhausts for too long.
Heating is a pretty big concern, especially if you're baking lots of lightmaps in-engine or in Maya/etc and don't have a slave box for baking itself and other maps.
Obviously if you're taking it places, then it should be sturdy and not excessively heavy or clunky. Battery life isn't as much of a concern if you're using it for 3d, because it's going to be a lot less than advertised for that kind of use.
EDIT:
If you can, go for Dell and Alienware. Overpriced, but the warranty is 999 times better than Asus. Asus warranty department are like Bethesda's QA team - they exist in theory only.
Lol
Cheap, reliable, free mouse, with a nice bag, sturdy, easy to clean, proper sink fans, and 3 year warranty without extra.
Anything else and you're settling for less.
For about 1,400-1,700 (pending on country and taxes), you can a pretty good laptop from them, something with a high end budget card.
For about 2K, you're getting a monster of a laptop from them.
So yeah, I honestly suggest Asus products, they don't break as easily, and their support is mint.
Just make sure a few things that:
A) The Processor is an Intel (of latest architecture).
Never get Alienware, it's even more overpriced than Apple, but it's just flashy junk in terms of build quality.
i'm having issues in 10.7 when using the laptop as a desktop replacement, hanging off an external screen where it seems the automatic switch between GFX chips is causing kernel panics on system wakeup quite often. well documented problem on mac forums, too.
i'm also uneasy about apple's direction they seem to take OSX in. i'd rather have a proper desktop OS that comes on an install disc (like 10.6 snow leopard was) than some blown-up version of iOS, everything online and in-the-cloud.
not to mention the awful app-store and their general tendency to erect a fence around their platform.
seeing how they apparently neglect their line of desktop machines in favour of gadgets is also not exactly boosting my confidence that i'll be getting another apple machine when it's time for the next update.
Build quality is not very important for desktops. You can almost run a desktop in a paper shoebox as long as you don't move it.
For laptops it's extremely important and I've experienced things like internal connectors coming loose after 4 months with Alienware. Everyone at work agreed the purchase was a mistake, even the boss who pushed so hard for them.
Alienware shat it's pant around half a year in and had no backup hardware onboard, plus the warranty didn't cover certain things, so it was scrap right off the bat.
Dell burned the graphic cards 1 year in, and the onboard graphic card couldn't even render a text page without lagging, not to mention, they have severally underclocked the hardware since the heat-sinks were utter crap.
HP was the worst, it started screen flickering 4 months in due to faulty screen wires, which I sent in two times, and they didn't fix, 2 months later, the Adapter gave out and had to patch it up myself, because again, they didn't fix it. Also, the warranty gave out, and they were forcing me to renew it 2 months on it left. Plus, the material they make their stuff out of is a dirt magnet.
So yeah, between these brands, the one my family and relatives used, I have enough data sample to say in a small form that Asus is the best option for portable.
Plus, Razor mice and padded bags are a nice extra that comes with Asus products.
I wouldn't recommend their laptops if you plan on carrying one with you all the time, but if you are looking for a portable desktop then they might be worth a shot.
They are also quite cheap for the specs you are getting. Mine is nowhere near top of the line (i5-2410m, 8 gigs of ram, 15" 1920x1080, GTX 560M), but I bought it for an equivalent of $1200. To get something better at that time, I would have paid roughly $400 more.
look up gfxCardStatus, it's allowing you to switch videocards either automatically or manually. not sure if it works under 10.7 though, hope it does.
Searching lead me to these forums: http://forum.notebookreview.com/notebook-manufacturers/
And from what I've read MSI and Sager look very favourable. Seeing as you're stateside a nice custom build could be the best bet for you.
http://www.gentechpc.com/index.asp
You don't buy Alienware or Dell for the quality - that's their problem. Their warranty is the best however, and not by a small amount. You should find replacement while they fix as well as the throughput of product meaning they can often upgrade your laptop with new parts rather than finding old parts.
I don't understand why "Gamer " laptops have over 8gb of ram though. Aren't most games these days 32 bit in the first place?
works really well downloaded half a dozen steam games on to it and works fine.. Shogun total war II chugs a bit though..
Some of the higher end macbooks, and some Lenovo's have e-IPS or better screens. I wouldn't want to do 3d work on a laptop with a crap screen, as you'll often view a laptop screen from a variety of angles.
I have a super-awesome-fantastic Lenovo X220 with the upgraded screen and an I5. But its a 12.5 inch portable solution that wouldn't replace a desktop. Lenovo has some larger models, but the e-IPS screen may only be available with the X2** range laptops and tablets.
It looks like the Lenovo W520, I7, 15.6 inch, has a better than average TN panel with decent view angles and color reproduction.
Looks like the dell M4600 has an IPS screen, so maybe look into that. Looks like the IPS screen is an extra $450 which might put it out of your budget, there is another "premium panel" screen upgrade for $50 but its not clear what it is.
I'm not sure which MB's have quality screens, I'm not talking ridiculous pixel density here, but viewing angles and color accuracy. I think most still use TNs?
I've been working on an Asus g73jw as for about a year and a half now. So far its been a very decent machine for the price. My one complaint has been color accuracy. The Asus seems to be more contrasty and under saturate reds compared to the other monitors I have access to. It's not terrible, but its enough that I'm looking to get a nice second monitor for painting and color work.
I know some (most?) of the Asus laptops come with a bazillion colour-correcting bits of software. I think one of them was Splendid colour enhancement or something and it (at least it used to) appear with a logo upon start-up.
Have you tried checking those out? The one I had didn't kill the reds, but made darker blacks and stronger greens and yellows.
Apple itself uses different displays even within the same configuration though, there's some CLI command to find out the display manufacturer of your macbook, but you'd have to google for it. Or better order your mac from a place that has a no-questions-asked return policy (also good for dead pixels).
I definitely will be taking the screen quality into consideration and will spare no expense in that regard.
Like I said, I am willing to really bust out the money on this, because I need it to last a long time, around 4 to 5 years.
Looks like you guys are screaming ASUS and Mac....do that many of you really use the MacBook for 3D artistry? I find it surprising, but the last thing I want to do is be biased when it comes to my purchasing decision.
Overall, I care just a little about the Look, but much more so about the hardware and quality. I've seen the Sager options (And had one in the past of which I was happy with), however I don't know if they have what I really need.
I definitely want to stay away from AMD GPU's, as I have had so much trouble in the past with them and 3D Art.
Ideal specs would be ~2.5 GHZ Quad Ivy Bridge, 8GB PC15000 1666MHZ RAM, and around 200GB SSD, and a Kepler based Nvidia card. Asus gets damn close to this ideal situation (for me), with their coming G75, but I'm afraid the 660M that's inside won't live up to be that great. Supposedly, they ran the UE3 Samaritan Demo on just one of those Kepler cards, instead of having to run it on 3 Fermi based architecture cards.
Overall: I want to be able to run the Samaritan Demo on my laptop :poly142:
Yes, I've been using mine for work (professional and personal) for the past 4 years. Do keep in mind though, that I'm (and most other people too unless they run an OS X compatible app like Maya/Silo/C4D etc) dual-booting Windows through BootCamp at which point it effectively becomes a PC laptop, albeit an expensive, but very well built one.
Then you won't be getting a current gen MacBook. They all use ATI cards right now, apart from the low end machines which just run an integrated Intel chip. They may or may not add NVidia chips later in a range refresh but I honestly expect them to just drop 3rd party cards altogether and use their own proprietary graphics cores like they have in the iOS devices. That could be a way off though.
That said, I've had no problems whatsoever with my ATI card MBPro, but I know plenty of people are rightly very wary of them.
I would suggest you go check out the MacBooks in person at the Apple Store, they really are great pieces of hardware. If you're set on going NVidia though, you'll either have to go PC, or wait until a possible refresh of the MacBook line in June/July.
It sounds like you want blazing fast, eye-searing performance though which you also won't get from a MacBook. I kinda settled for build quality and screen quality over ultra high performance specs, although its no slouch and plenty powerful enough for me to get work done on.
ditto. ATI just suffers from a bad reputation gained a couple of years ago. Hard to get rid of that stigma. Only real issue is they can't run CUDA apps.
Do Asus' have matte screens?
This sounds a bit bonkers to be honest, you might end up spending $3500 to get all of that in a laptop, which is just.... insane.
I know you said you don't want to hear the PC vs laptop argument, but what sort of reason do you need a laptop this powerful? It really, really sounds like you need a $1500ish PC and maybe a $1000 laptop(which will still work for 90% of what you want to do).
One thing I'm starting to notice with higher end workstation models that have IPS screen options is that they often only come with quadros or firegls, which is unfortunate.
Oh also, just RE: color correction etc, even with the best color correction software or whatever, if your colors and brightness change when you move your head around a bit because its a TN screen with poor view angles, its not really all that helpful. So I still think a quality panel is the way to go.
Take into account freelancing or indies, and you have yourself many good reasons to be mobile.
Besides, it not like ZBrush, Max, or any other application requires insane amount of 'performance hardware', so it can last with you upto 5+ years, with the only thing needing a replacement or cleanup is most likely the HDD, to have them run properly unless you, yourself, are running high end games in the first place, which then indeed would be kinda silly to have a laptop that expensive for that reason alone.
Also, we have come a long way from Laptops being 3,500, I don't think I have ever seen a 3,5K Laptop which was any better then a 1,500 or 1,800 lappy honestly, which themselves rate as a high end budget PC (unless you are big time into fancy led lights which drain the battery).
So yeah...laptop are great honestly, nothing wrong with them, the only real issue the people buying them and who don't know what they want. A 1,500 laptop from ASUS is pretty much a high end budget PC with maybe a couple of MHz shaved off from the VGA and CPU, but will fulfill your need 100% of the time.
Make sure it's an nVidia and 64bit, and voila bullet proof for the next 5 year plus...you can even play Tribes on it!
I would say the higher price is totally acceptable if you travel fairly often for longer periods of time. I'm studying abroad so for the past few years I had to spend roughly £200 a year to send my desktop back and forth and constantly worry about whether it will arrive intact. Having a laptop that acts as a portable desktop is just so much easier.
Of course, I don't advocate spending $3500 on a super-high-end laptop. Chances are it will be bulky, loud, hot and within a year or two you will have models with the same spec, that are cheaper and more portable. $1500 is as high as I would ever go.
Just to be clear, I wasn't disputing the idea of needing a laptop, simply the idea of wanting a laptop with hardware that only the highest-end PC's have. If that is really a requirement, I think it makes a lot more sense to get a PC for when you really need it, and just get a good laptop that will suffice for, like I said, 90% of your work.
If you need a laptop, you need a laptop - I understand that.
Yep, when you need it, its the only option.
Yeah I tend to agree here, the really high end models are so large, heavy, run so hot and have such poor battery life that its just like, what is the difference between this and a PC? The super-workstation laptops are hardly any more portable. I guess if you take it from home to the office every day it would still be better than a PC, or if you move often, but you won't casually take it to a cafe or something.
Anyway, I was just legitimately curious why the OP wants/needs that much performance out of a laptop. *Shrug*
I've seen reference to that as well, but didnt find anything useful when I went looking for an actual program to run... Possible i just missed it. I'll take another look sometime.
I did muck around with the windows monitor calibration controls and made things a bit better. Using an actual on-screen calibrator would probably help even more, but from what I've read online my screen just doesn't produce as wide a range of colors as a good desktop monitor would.
Even with a perfectly balanced screen, though, you still never know what someone else will be using when they view your work. For really important things I usually try to check it on a couple of screens and make sure it at least looks good everywhere.
There's non way you are going to get everything you want in a $2500 laptop and have it last 5 years.
I really like it, performance is great for 3D stuff. Can only really have the settings on medium for games though and its pretty noisy and can get pretty hot when it is gaming. Nothing major though, had all day gaming sessions with it and I haven't had any problems.
The main reason I went for it over the Asus G74 was because I really didn't like how big and bulky the G74 was.
And its pretty much just HP's copy of a MacBook Pro. So its nice looking. It's also a fair bit cheaper then a MacBook Pro, so it might be worth checking out if that's the direction your heading.
I completely understand your logic here EQ, however, it is simply a matter of where I am in my life right now, that I know it will be ideal for me to have a Laptop. In any other case, I would buy a great desktop, ofcourse.
As far as prices go, Laptops nowadays are getting to be much more affordable and almost just as good as great desktops. That plus how mobile I am just calls for a laptop.
I am seriously considering the G75 (Coming out May).
ZacD - I definitely can attest to laptops lasting 4+ years; The one I am on at this moment is that old, and I am still able to do incredible things on it. If you're curious, it's an Dell M1730 with 9800GT SLI.
It's simply a matter of it's parts starting to fail that I need a new laptop (And would like more GPU power and CPU power in general).
This is very enticing, but I would definitely want it with the 680M...
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-G75V-Notebook.73636.0.html
I want to purchase a new laptop within 2 weeks, so I'm dying to see what comes out with all the Ivy Bridge and new 6xxM model GPU's. Only time will tell I guess.
A hot topic of debate seems to be about the new AMD 7970HD GPU. People are kneeling down to worship this thing, but I am still weiry of AMD. I just have problems trusting anything other than Nvidia when it comes to 3d Dev.
Will they take the G74s off sale when the G75 comes out? Delighted to read that 3d is the reason for the exclusion of optimus. Where are you planning to buy the Asus from OP?
Also, you may want to wait a bit . intel just announced their new ivy bridge CPUs and all laptops will be seeing refreshes soon. Both macs and PCs.. everything will be changed in just a few weeks or a month time.
Just because I haven't heard them suggested, no price listed though...
http://www.pctorque.com/sager-7280-s-1-gaming-computers.php