What new Laptop for 3D Modelling, Rendering, Graphics and CAD?
creativecortex_354c96ff23
Posts: 25
Hi folks, I'm looking for a new Windows machine. As it's been so long since I bought one I'm asking you geniuses to give me your recommendations, particularly if you have bought one in the last 3-6 months.
It's time I replaced my tired Medion Akoya I've loved and worked hard for about 7 years. Current spec is Win7 64, Intel Core i5-3210M 2.5Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, GEFORCE GT 640M 2Gb, 1 Tb HDD.
It's still a good machine in lots of ways but hardware is getting ropey, battery nearly dead, recently replaced HDD as it was giving failure signs.
What it needs to put up with:
- I do lots of CAD in Sketchup (looking to do SolidWorks)
- Modelling in Carrara/Hexagon
- Lots of rendering and animating
- Lots and lots of Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks
- Premiere, Sony Vegas, BlackMagic
- Some interactive stuff in CopperCube, HTML5, Unity etc.
Love to hear your experiences/suggestions. Thanks in advance!
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Comments
Buy new battery, replace hd with ssd and if possible get external enlosure for external video card to do Iray. Otherwise, get a new laptop that has a port that allows for external video card> Or just get decent second generation desktop and install a new Nvidia video card. Internal nvidia laptop graphics are not conducive to the stress Iray places on graphic cards. If you are not a desktop fan get a laptop that can use external gpu. ~ my 2 cents
A laptop, except a stupidly expensive one, is never going to be a satisfactory experience for your uses.
You could spend $5k or $6k on a laptop or you could get a laptop for much less than half that that would perform substantially better.
Thanks SilverDolphin, that's good advice.
All fair points. Unfortunately it has to be portable because I need to work from different locations and can't lug a desktop around.
Then your best bet is to pick up a mid range gaming laptop. 1060 equipped laptops cost between $1.5k and $3k. If you can live with a small screen, 13" , you might be able to find one on sale for closer to $1000.
I know some folks bash HP relentlessly, but their Omen line has been making very good strides. Besides looking cool, they come with some pretty nice graphics cards, good memory choices and decent prices for something tagged with the "gaming," moniker. MSI is also a solid choice. I'd lurk around places like the Linus Tech Tips forum and ask there, as well. I used a four year old I-7 HP Envy 'til Christmas. It worked well for Daz although memory constraints ultimately meant that large scenes were non-doable, making Daz crash A LOT. As a recommendation, whatever you go with max out the memory. Also, consider as large of an SSD as possible, and a fast external HD. Daz will quickly fill up even a gaming laptop's internal storage, so the external drive can be useful for one on the go, unless your Daz library is really small. Finally, consider a 17" screen. I know most people are going with smaller displays nowadays for traveling, but a 15" at a minimum and preferably a 17" inch serve you well.
The big question is if you're really going to use Solidworks intensively or not and what will be the weight of the assembly you'll be displaying/modeling
Gaming card are weak for that. Even the lowest Quadro beats the crap out of a GTX 1080 Ti see https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SOLIDWORKS-2018-GPU-Comparison-What-Is-the-Meaning-of-This-1112/
If you are planning to often use Solidwork with big models, Quadro is the right choice. Any gaming card will have bad performance
Personnaly, I'd go for at least a Mobile Quadro P3200 or P4000
For rendering, Gaming card usually have more cuda cores and thus render faster, and cost less than a Quadro, so there is a priority you must decide here. It should be noted that it should be possible now to find notebooks with mobile RTX cards, which could be good long term investment
For sketchup, and 2D apps, get the processor with highest base clock frequency. These applications are more sensible to single core performance
For Premiere/Blackmagic, you should get as much CPU power as you can which means as many core as possible. Depending on what effect you use, some will be optimized for GPU rendering but in most case, it's CPU bound (however you are the one who knows what you use). Processor with 6 cores or more are better for these
Here too you need to give a priority between 2D apps + sketchup vs video editing. More cores usually means lower frequency, so you have to choose wisely to get the right balance.
I don't know the length of your videos in Blackmagic but that easily eats 1 TB for serious work. So I think 512 GB SSD for the OS and 2 TB additionnal Sata Disk should be the minimal.
16 GB Ram is the minimum, but if you use Blackmagic or any video compositing software intensively, the more RAM, the better, as it is used to cache prerendered movie sequence
If you're serious about Solidworks, you should go for a mobile workstation with a Quadro. Otherwise, a good gaming laptop should do
Thanks, that's helpful insight.
Really helpful, thank you. Solidworks is likely to be a rare stretch, mostly everything else. So 6 core CPU seems to be the way with a Gamer GPU. Appreciate you taking the time.
I have no connection to HP the company but all my machines are from them. I'm propably going to get the the OMEN Laptop - 15t
All the upgrades are there and a bit costly but worth it if you are need a portable laptop rig for work.
HP just added this over the weekend. I need a new laptop also and I knew HP was going to be dropping the 2000 rtx series soon but not this soon(mid March). I do both Music and Digital media and I needed a portable laptop before I get a Z-Rig, from them. So this Omen can and will be my laptop rig.
BTW, google "zworkstations" to check out their pro z-series. You can also just go to HP site themselves under "workstation" and check out the z-mini.
IMO, the two most important questions which need to be answered are :
The second question is the most important one, otherwise we can speculate about the mostest awesome-est super technology that is far above anyone's price range.
Sounds like you need an all-around powerful machine. You mention Blackmagic, and I assume you're referring to Davinci Resolve (the mostest-awesome-est free video editing software in the universe)? If you are, then yes, it will mostly take advantage of many CPU cores, and GPU usage is minimal (except for specific effects, etc.). And if by "rendering and animating" you mean Iray or Blender or other GPU-intensive rendering engine, then yeah, you'll probably want a powerful GPU that does renderings really fast (especially if you're doing animating like you say). But again you get what you pay for.
And yeah, HP is fine, as are most of the other big names (MSI, Dell, Alienware, etc.). Though you'll invariably hear from those who know a guy who heard about another guy who saw an internet post about a bad experience someone else had with an HP/Dell/etc. (which in reality was probably ultimately due to user error...).
At the end of the day, it pretty much comes down to how much you're willing to spend, and how fast you want it to do your stuff. Though of course there are other ways around powerful and expensive machines, like if you're willing to do scene management for your 3D renders and use stuff like compositing to speed up your workflow and do it more efficiently (which personally I recommend as Step #1 to everyone). Especially with the insane prices of GPU's nowadays.
But if you're in the $2,000 range, then I think something like the HP that Battlematrix recommends looks pretty good. Of course the internal/mobile RTX 2070 (or any mobile GPU) probably won't perform as fast as it's desktop counterpart, but if it's fast enough for whatever you're doing then it's fine. And no, BTW, Iray doesn't place any special stress on graphics cards, other than using them at near 100% utilization while they're rendering. The same stress it sees when it's doing any other GPU-intensive tasks (engineering calculations/simulations, AI, etc.). Which is what they are designed for.
As Ebergerly mentioned, the most important thing is what you are willing to spend.
But i am one of those people who will always advise against HP. It is not a case of knowing a guy who knows a guy who heard about a guy having a bad experience, we were using HP devices for a while at work and the experience was not good, so i do tend to pass that experience on.
What i would reccomend is an MSI laptop. They do many many different models for each price bracket, in both gaming and workstation variations. My dad has had two MSI workstation laptops now, and he has been very happy with them. Like you, one of the applications he uses it for is Solidworks.
Having a portable external GPU to assist in rendering is something that i would definitely do if i needed to work on the move, you just have to remember that they generally connect through Thunderbolt ports, so your laptop would need one of those, and they also require their own power. So you cannot use them if you dont have access to a wall socket - they dont run on the laptops battery. They are generally not cheap either, so again it comes back to price.
Many external GPU's connect by USB C you just have to take care when shopping.
Thanks BattleMatrix, ebergerly, joseft and kenshaw011267.
The boss has now confirmed budget as £1500 GBP. Not massive but a big leap from what I have now.
Was up late doing some comparisons, and frankly the difference between an £1100 GBP and a £1500 GBP seems so minimal as to not be worth the extra expense. I'd need to go to £2000 or more to make an important difference (mostly in GPU). As I told the boss yesterday, I'm not willing to pay more than the £1100 GBP without paying lots and lots and lots more. Lol. Anyway, I've linked to my sheet below, tell me what you think:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TjXgxuMlb-feVwz8V_nvTylTGebLk9y2wNXEtiVfy_k/edit?usp=sharing
Currently I favour the:
Asus TUF FX705GM-EV101T
Core I7-8750H
16GB
1TB HDD
256GB SSD
17.3 Inch
144Hz GeForce GTX 1060 Full HD
@£1100 GBP near as.
Having a quick look at that site, it looks like you can go to a slightly different model with the GTX 1070 gpu for an extra ~300.
That is still within your budget, so i would certainly do that if it was me. I do not believe you mentioned what render engine you will be using, but if you are using iRay, that extra 2gb of VRAM on the 1070 is going to be very handy. 1060 will do you no good if you cant fit your scenes onto it and have to render using the CPU
Good advice joseft, thanks!
Render engine would be iRay, or Cycles, or anything Daz does by default.
I admit that I have not looked at the spreadsheet or the site, but I am one who generally also uses a laptop for most of my work. A couple of things worry me about the specs you have head and some of the advice you're getting.
One is your storage. If at all possible, I would swap out that HDD. SSDs would create a lot less heat as well as significantly less moving parts. I would bump the SSD to 1TB even if that meant foregoing the HDD all together.
Heat dissipation is going to be your biggest issue. Make sure the rig has a decent number of fans, particularly a dedicated GPU fan. Most of the "gaming" laptops will have this.
Your next issue will be power. Try and figure out the math of the power requirements yourself and compare them against the power supply / brick that comes with the laptop. I know I had to argue with my OEM to get them to provide the right power brick when they defaulted down to the lower one that they said was "adequate." They only relented when I pointed out past tickets on their forum where others had done research to show that the GPU would throttle down to compensate for a lower than sufficient voltage.
Do not go with the adage of "you can add on." If the laptop's GPU isn't good enough and you are already looking at external devices, then walk away. You are starting from a base that is already inadequate for your uses and will only result in headaches as software becomes more demanding. You will also have the added headache of having another item (or more) to carry when you travel. The external devices are really only useful for when you are back at your home base. And if that is what you are going to do, then there are better solutions...
For example, I mostly do not render final images on my laptop. I will compose and test render on my laptop, but then render the final output on my desktop when I get home. It's much more cost effective then trying to augment a laptop docking station to do it. Plus it allows me to continue working while the desktop is tied up with the task of rendering.
If done right, with a little bit of investment (of which 1,500 should be sufficient) then you can come away with a laptop that will work for at least a three or four years.
Interested Jason. Are you suggesting that £1500 GBP is enough to get laptop to do what you describe AND a desktop to do the rendering better?
Getting a desktop on that budget too would be pushing it a bit. You may be able to, but you would definately have to build your own.
The 1500 would / should be enough to get you a decent laptop though.
I am reluctant to offer the specs / price of the laptop I am using as it is pushing five years old, but still chugging along. At that time I paid a little more than the budget you are going with. And prices haven't changed that dramatically. In fact, they probably have gone down for the big ticket items (GPU, SSD).
My point is, expecting a laptop to do both function and render, is a little too much on the budget you have and kind of unreasonable for the hardware. But if you subdivide the purposes, you should be able to do reasonably well. A gaming laptop should give you excellent functionality results (drawing, composing, planning scenes, etc.) and reasonable (but not stellar) rendering results. Just don't try to get both in one package... or else you will know the pain of loading a model in and waiting ten minutes for it to appear, then having thirty second lag time as you try and work with it.
Last summer I got an Asus GL750G (17", i7-8750H, 512GB SSD+1TB Hybrid, 16GB, GTX1070). Cost about £1800 from Scan. I could have had a 1080 in it, but that would have cost an extra grand! (which was way beyond my budget, and not worth it IMHO when I still had access to a desktop with 1080Ti+980Ti combo for rendering). I've been very happy with it.
Iray rendering is around 2 times slower than on the desktop, but it's still good enough for test images, and even final renders if you don't mind leaving it running over dinner etc. (although generally I'd shunt files across to the desktop & let it batch render). Since most of what I do on it is in Modo / Carrara / Substance Painter / Photoshop it's perfectly fine. For me the ability to work away from my office was the primary motivator (due to health issues), and this laptop has been brilliant. kept me going, kept me working. I'm sure it's now discontinued, due to the new generation GPUs, but there's bound to be an equivalent model for the current gen.
Thanks Jason, that's good clarity. I'm having to prioritise creation and setup and willing to compromise render time (what I do isn't that complex anyway). Everything I have looked at is better than what I have, and what I have does what I want by and large but on the slow side for some things.
Thanks TangoAlpha. Doesn't sound too much different to what I am looking at:
Asus TUF FX705GM-EV101T
Core I7-8750H
16GB
1TB HDD
256GB SSD
17.3 Inch
144Hz GeForce GTX 1060 Full HD
@£1100 GBP near as.
I'd say it's AVsP + avisynth but Resolve is in my top ten
Personally I'd rather get the ASUS notebook with 512GB SSD https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/asus-gl504gs-core-i7-8750h-16gb-512gb-ssd-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-8gb-gamin-gl504gs-es111t/version.asp
and add a 2TB SHDD afterwards https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/-st2000dx002/version.asp or get a portable hdd
Whatever gaming notebook you'll buy, at this price, there are two "problems" you'll face : they'll run hot and because they are powerfull, they'll drain the battery quickly.
And a little known problem... If you have a power brick like mine (240W) you won't be able to plug it into some travel locations (planes, etc.). I found this out the hard way. Multiple times.
+1. Mine has 512, and it's worth it for the extra mindspace of not constantly worrying about over filling your C drive.
Thanks for the tips.
Do you find the 15" screen less helpful?
We have little control on what"s available on the planes. The only thing you can do is buy a model with a better battery, or a notebook with switchable Optimus tech or have a second battery. In any case that will cost money and we're back to price
I used to fill my former 256 GB too quickly. It's better with 512 GB.
Did you mean 17" ? Screen size is up to you. A bigger screen can be usefull for some programs with lots of icons, but your notebook will be a bit more cumbersome. I have no problem when I switch from my 27" desktop to my 15" notebook but I don't do exactely the same thing on both. That's really a personnal taste/choice
Oh, I am aware. I just wanted to make sure the OP was aware. As the same issue happened at more than one dining establishment, a hotel business center, and one other location that escapes me now.
Alot of time the battery cannot be replaced or switched out. So you need to plan accordingly for the unforeseen. Business travellers get use to some things just working, which is fine on a 90W power supply. Not so fine with the power supply these monsters usually require.
Thanks, I'm appreciating all the perspectives, some things I would not have thought of. I tend to use my laptop as my main machine, work at work, take it home, work at home. I'm doing it now on my current 17", not sure how I would feel about shrinking it down for creative work but I'll have a think. I'm not rendering toy story 3, just visuals of products.
My laptop is a 17, but I only use that screen when I absolutely have to. As you are already fearing, there isn't much visual real estate to work with.
I have the luxury of having an external monitor both home and where I usually work. So the laptop is almost always hooked to one of those.
In hotel rooms, where that luxury isn't possible, I made do on the laptop screen. But it is a work style change.