Hi All,
buying a new Laptop,
does anyone have some advice on the minimal / avarage / top specifications of for instance graphic card, processor and ram
looking forward to hear from you…
Every smartphone these days can run WebGL apps assuming this is what you meant with GL coding, just for comparsion. For notebooks it’s a little tricky, you will have good enough specs usually but you should especially be careful about the graphics card, make sure it actually has an actual GPU and not some intel graphics crap as that would be basically useless. With Nvidia you probably want to avoid “Optimus” as this mostly disables the card from being used, but you can configure this.
Other than that it depends on the level you want to work with, if it’s even bound to WebGL or if you want to use Unreal/Unity as well, for these you need to invest more money and would rather recommend a desktop, it’s mostly their IDE which require up to 32 GB RAM as recommended.
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thank you for your insight,
so a dedicated graphics card for starts, would a quadro be needed or does a GTX do as well, i’m on the road a lot so a desktop is not belonging to the realm of options…
many polygons is one of the plans i have to code in three.js
maybe later some unity and unreal…
for now i think of a minimum i7, 32gb ram, ssd, the graphic card is still a question
cause when i code on a strong card, then phones might not be able to process the complex graphics…
thinking of a Lenovo P series, but which one, or HP Spectre or the Studio…
Rather go for a GTX, you have no benefits from Quadros for WebGL or game development, their main purpose is for CAD with more precision (64bit), they are much more expensive while you get a more powerful card for less.
32 GB is a reasonable amount for development/media production (but gets expensive for notebooks), i7 depending on which as well, ssd anyway.
It’s been a while since i looked for a notebook, but i made the best experience with the Acer Aspire series in terms of reliability, specs and price, but there might be better options.
thank you, that saves a lot of money… then the Lenovo X1 Extreme comes also into play…
i7 6cores is the plan, but worry a bit about heat and especially batterylife
i’m going for Lenovo or HP cause of their international On-Site service contracts, thats for me being on the road a lot also important
That’s pretty good, rather overpowered for WebGL/mobile development, but if you’re going to use Unreal and other hungry software like Adobe then it’s a good choice probably.
For batterylife that would be tough anyway, especially once you have several tools open and working with Unreal. You should also make sure you can change the battey.
changing batteries or adding additional batteries is not available anymore, neither on HP nor Lenovo…
thank you very much for your info…
If you mainly work without charger that might be a problem, batteries get weaker over time decreasing the batterylife drastically, if you buy a powerful notebook the battery can be an issue long before the specs are anywhere close from being considered outdated. But some YT and other sites reviews can tell you more for these specific products.
I have a 970m with an i5 and 8gb ram. It’s a clevio barebones that you (well, probably third parties since you have to solder the gpu) can put whatever hardware you want inside. I was a bit wary of buying an unknown brand but it’s actually great, been all over the world with me for 3 years from beaches to humid jungles and no problems. Runs very cool too, if sightly bulky.
For webgl programming, it’s fine. In fact it’s kind of useful that I don’t have crazy specs as it means I’m testing in more of a real-world environment.
However, it’s really not enough for 3d modelling. I use 3ds max, but it’s probably going to be a similar situation for blender, Maya, or unreal, unity editor etc. The graphics card is fine since I’m not generally working on huge scenes, the CPU struggles a bit with complex operations… But it’s really the lack of ram that shows. My next laptop I’m gonna pump all my spare money into getting 32gb of ram.
You need to figure out what your use case is give be. 3 years ago I didn’t spend nearly as much time doing modelling work so I didn’t factor that in.
Lenovo has extra warrenty for battery replacement
and quickcharge technology…
we gotta do with the things that are available… i think its really a poor choice of the brands to put batteries inside
i have already an older HP 8570W, mobile worstation…32 ram… there my Maya is installed, photoshop and so on, rendering i do on an Z800 that has dual processors and large quadro… its build into a server of my friend so i can remote acces it… rendering frames laptop can do, but gets really hot… and slow compared to Z800… modeling and so on is going great on HP Laptop… going to do a software development course in few weeks/// from the code-institute and want to seperate my old & new “career”
lerning three.js a bit… and like to implement some art in my new website… and that i like to do on new laptop… was thinking on buying a new mobile workstation but they are heavy to carry around… so want a lightweight toy for the next few years… and was not sure what specs would be good for the new one…
thank you all for sharing your insights… very helpfull… cheers