Marius from Render Street takes a deep dive into the world of laptops and their suitability for running Blender and Cycles.
Marius Iatan writes:
A lot of people approached me lately with the question ‘What laptop should I buy for Blender?‘ This is becoming a harder and harder decision, as technology is changing so rapidly, and new hardware is constantly making its way to the market. This doubled as a personal need, since I too was looking to buy a new notebook.
So I started doing some research and ended up publishing my findings in an extensive review on the RenderStreet blog. I tried covering both the technology in itself, and particular notebook models that may be suitable for various use cases.
In the first part I focus on the technical side, discussing the two top of the line GPUs from the current NVidia Maxwell line of products (the GTX 970M and 980M) and the choices available for the other components of the laptop: CPU, memory and disk.
While doing the research and looking for user opinions, I got to the NotebookReview forum. There I had the pleasure of discussing the matter with one of the top reviewers, HTWingNut, who agreed to benchmark the two NVidia cards in Blender. The Cycles performance figures are available here.
Finally, I scanned the top producers for their newest releases and selected the TOP 5 best laptops for Blender. You can read the complete review, with configuration, pros & cons and pricing here.
Hoping this will be useful for the Blender community, I’m looking forward for the comments that this topic will rise.
Image source: MSI GT72 official image
4 Comments
Awesome!! Love this post!
Glad to hear it Nick! I've put some hours in the research (loved doing it, too), and I hope it will prove useful. Maybe help someone save some money in the process too :)
Sorta late with this response, but am wondering what the best Mac is to buy for Blender 3D now, mid 2015? Thanks in advance. Alan
I have an iMac late 2012, Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac13,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 3.2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
Memory: 32 GB
Awesome