Laptop buying advice, round 2
peteypixel
Posts: 13
in The Commons
Hey guys and gals!
I'm still on the hunt to find a usable, cheap laptop for my daz3d obsessed baby brother. I'm talking to a laptip seller and am wondering if someone could tell me if these specs are good enough for the program:
Core i7, NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M graphics card, 1.80 GHz processor, 1TB HDD. CD/DVD writer/reader. USB, HDMI and card reader.
Thanks!
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My baby brother is a BIG Daz head, but doesn't own his own machine. To celebrate him graduating to High School, I thought I'd buy a computer for him. Problem is, I have no idea what constitutes a good machine for Daz outside of "get a Nvidia graphics card!" Could someone help a clueless sibling out by telling him if these specs are solid for Daz studio renders. I know one complaint of his is render times.
CPU: AMD Phenom II X3 720 (3 cores, 2.8 GHz)
RAM: 4GB
HDD: 320GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 555 (OEM from Alienware) 1GB
OS: Windows 10
Thanks!
I'm afraid not 0 -4GB of RAM is far too little, a 1GB GPU isn't going to do much for iray (if that model is even supported), and the HD is pretty cramped for content.
I see, thanks for the response. The search continues!
What is your budget?
Also there are several threads on PC specs that you might want to look at:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/232581/new-hardware#latest
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/226016/build-new-pc-for-rendering-iray
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/202146/recommendations-for-a-rendering-pc-iray
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/194381/advice-requested-proposed-pc-spec-for-iray-rendering
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/179746/help-with-building-a-pc-specifically-made-for-daz-studio-iray-renders-gaming
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/115696/new-computer-help-for-iray-rendering
I asked the same thing awhile back. The general consensus among the forum members who responded was that a Ryzen 5 (I'm an AMD guy) was sufficient. The graphics card, however, really should be the 1070 class or above. You can get by with far less, but the redering time will be significantly slowed down.
Rysen 2.0 is shipping in April. If you can wait that long, this means that the original Ryzen boxes will likely be discounted to make room for the new series. I'm already seeing HP doing that with their Ryzen Omen desktops. You may be able to snap up a decent cpu/graphics card combo from HP, or Dell, or someone else at a nice discount.
Bob
You could look into a refurb. I know there is a very real risk involved, but I've had many refurbs and never had a problem with even one of them (phones, laptops, desktops). My current desktop is a refurb I bought from Newegg for less than a thousand bucks with two 8 core Xeons, and 64 gigs of ram. The only thing I had to buy was the gfx card. You can however, find nice machines with decent specs for much much less. If you're in the states, look at places like Newegg, TigerDirect Business, etc. Even Dell sells refurbs of their machines. If you're not in the states, I'm sure there are equivalents in your own country where you can buy a reputable refurbished machine.
For specs, I'd get at the very least a quad core proc, 16 gigs of ram and an Nvidia card with 6 gigs bare minimum ram. 8 gigs is better.
Laurie
Threads merged.
For a desktop, I don't know about easier (or cheaper) but it may have its advantages; for a laptop there are kits (or were) but I suspect the trade-offs would be worse than with a desktop.
Laptops tend to cost more for less, and there are concerns that they may be more prone to heat stress (a render is going to make a machine work hard for a while). You don't note how much RAM the system has, or how much the nVidia GPU has. In any event, I'm not sure how much longer the 740M will be supported - it depends which generation of chips it belongs to (which Physicist it is named for).
Another problem with a laptop is that they are not easy to upgrade, whereas it is easy to add more Ram to a desktop. 8gb is still not really a lot of RAM these days.
I only have 8gb I must admit, but I don't use DS
The GPU has only 2GB of RAM - it can use up to 4, but that's presumably taking from the system RAM so you'd be left with only 6GB there. The 740M is a Kepler family chip, which is likely to be the minimum supported by the next Iray update (see https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2964251/#Comment_2964251 ) so there's probably a good chance that it would not be long before the 740M was itself no longer supported.
You may want to specify if they are using Iray or not. I would assume so, but if not, then the GPU spec is not important.
But if they are using Iray, there is absolutely no substitute for a good GPU. And the 740M listed in several of the ones you listed are not good at all. Honestly, they would be just about useless for Iray. A "cheap" laptop is simply not going to cut it.
The absolute bare minumim I would suggest would be no worse than a 1050ti. This has 4GB of VRAM, and even that is kind of small. But it can worked with, as that is what I am stuck with myself. Please note that VRAM is different from sysem RAM. System RAM is important, but not as vital as VRAM when it comes to Iray. The 1070 is a popular choice, and it has 8GB of VRAM. However prices are out of control right now.
You have several major roadblocks right now, and that is the inflated price of GPUs in the market today due in large part to crypto miners buying all the stock. This will make finding a decent machine a lot more difficult than it would have been say 2 years ago. Some GPU prices have doubled and even tripled compared to what they originally were. The 1050ti I mentioned just so happens to be one of the GPUs that miners like, and its prices are insane. With that in mind, it might actually be cheaper to buy a laptop in some cases, because crypto miners are not buying laptops. So prices of high end laptops are not inflated like desktops.
Anything less than a 1050ti will not cut it. Anything with less than 4GB of VRAM will be crippling, and even 4GB has limitations. He would need to be creative about creating some scenes to fit into 4GB. But you did say cheap, and laptops or anything with a 1070 or better are not going to be what I consider cheap.
For reference, I found a laptop with a 1060 that has 6GB VRAM for $800 at Costco. That is a decent price for what it has. A laptop with a 1050ti was about $100 less. However, the 1060 is better enough to warrant stepping up. But is that "cheap", probably not.