What s the best laptop for designers?

I have been using a Lenovo E540 for the past two years now and I have been running, Auto CAD, Solidworks 2017, Fusion 360, Inventor, Photoshop, and Illustrator on it and have never had a problem. All I’ve done to it was upgrade the ram to 16GB.

Apple computers for rendering and I.D. modeling are pretty expensive and they don´t deliver the performance of a pc of the same price. Value/Price ratio here.

I will go for a computer with the higher ghz speed of the CPU I could buy with an SSD as hard disk. Rhino and Vray use a lot of the hard disk in certain situations.

16 Gb of RAM for the most of the projects are ok but if you can buy 32 would be nice.

Laptops get outdated very fast in these days, so I will not spend more than 2k on it. Just my thoughts.

I agree that for Solidworks, the graphics processor is very important.
Rendering is often CPU based so you have to look at the CPU benchmark rating.
An SSD is highly recommended and make sure to have an external backup drive as well.
You don’t need extremely high specs to run Rhino so you can go for a modest budget laptop with lower RAM, CPU and small SSD, as well and invest in a desktop PC as your rendering powerstation and backup drive.

I am also looking at getting a new laptop and although I know I can get a better deal with a windows machine, I don’t think I could give up the aesthetics and feel of a mac product. Microsoft products are looking good but the price is comparable to Mac. Something has to be said for the fact that I am still using my 2009 MPB and it runs Solidworks on my windows side fine and Adobe CC programs on my mac side. Switching to an SSD a few years back made a huge improvement but still. Note, this is my personal machine and I am not working full time on it.

I’m a big fan of my 2017 15" Samsung Notebook 9 Pro. Decent aesthetics, solid quality, Yoga hinge, Samsung Note tech, 16 gigs of RAM, Dedicated Graphics. Check it out!

I feel the same way, the price of a windows machine sounds really exciting to me but my MPB has been SUPER reliable and is 4 years old and runs like new and I run Keyshot and Rhino on it among adobe products all of the time.

Though it’s an old thread I want to put my input in. For me its Acer Aspire V17 Nitro

:slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Sorry I hadn’t replied to this until now - Cyberdemon had a pretty good answer for us!

FYI - my SurfaceBook is doing well (it was the top of the line version at introduction, so it has dual graphics cards, maxed out RAM and SSD). I’ll probably upgrade to a 15" SurfaceBook 2 in a year or so.

I agree with what others have mentioned, that MS did a good job developing this hardware to go with the Windows ecosystem. It’s nice to have one machine that handles everything I do, anywhere I want to do it.

I am using OMEN X by HP - 17-ap045tx. It is working fine

Hey how about ASUS Vivobook pro 15 N580VD, Dell G3, and Dell Precision Series? Are they suitable for 3D rendering and modeling?

It boils down to components and what you can afford. If it’s for work then you should get a workstation rather than a gaming laptop. The main difference is the graphics card.

Processor: Core i7 or Xeon
RAM: 16GB and higher
Graphics card: Nvidia Quadro (instead of a gaming card)
Storage: SSD recommended. 512

So yes, I’m sure you can use those computers fine. How much slower are they than mobile workstations…I don’t know. Vivobook and G3 are gaming computers. Dell Precission 5520 (smaller) and 7520 (bigger), Lenovo P52, HP Zbook (studio, 15, 15v, 15u) are mobile workstations that are configured for CAD & Rendering. Mobile workstations are configurable and up gradable. They will also be heavier and more expensive. You can always buy refurbished or NEW older models from their outlet stores.

Mobile Workstations may be overkill for what you are doing but who knows. It’s always a compromise of price, components & portability.

Good luck.

Update on my SurfaceBook - about six months ago (a year out of warranty) my screen started bulging slightly, creating halos at the four corners. I took it to my nearest Microsoft store and they confirmed the battery in the screen section was going bad - on the spot, they gave me a brand new (upgraded) SurfaceBook, no questions asked, apologized and said some of the earliest units had sub-par batteries. They said because I’d taken such good care of it and because they want customers coming back that they were happy to replace it for free. That’s good customer service, and will probably be a big reason I’ll get the SurfaceBook 2 next year.

wow, that is good customer service!

Now that’s “genius”.

Yep, I thought so too. I walked in expecting to fight for a discount on a new product, or thinking I would need to upgrade and try to get some sort of discount for the old one - so I was a pleasantly shocked. I stayed until had all my software reinstalled and tested the screen, the stylus, etc and they fed me and kept asking if I wanted anything else to drink.

SurfaceBook 2 here I come (next year).

I almost sprung for a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I loved the idea of having more or less full blown Adobe CC available on a tablet. The one thing that kept me away was the garbage stylus. If Adobe can follow up Photoshop for the new iPad Pro with at least Illustrator and InDesign I’m ditching a laptop all together in favor of the iPad Pro.

You might want to try the Surface Pro 6 and the Surface Book 2 - they keep improving the touch and stylus experience. Interestingly, MS bought the N-trig technology that we used to hate (in favor of Wacom, which Samsung bought) - so I bought a Samsung NotePro 12.2 tablet for that very reason, but the OS sucked, so I bought my Surface Book - it’s stylus actually provides a better experience than the Samsung.

The Microsoft Surface Pro 6 and the Surface Book 2 are the prime choice for designers nowadays.
I have yet to try the stylus though so if you are looking for a sketch pad I recommend anything that works with a Samsung pen (check your version).

The Pro 5 and 6 both have the 3K resolution display, but because the Pro 6 has the UHD GPU it is almost as fast as the GPU of the i7 version of the Pro 5.
Plus the i5 CPU of the Pro 6 is much faster than the i7 of the Pro 5 because this is a quad core processor. It is 40% faster than the octacore laptop I work on.

The Surface Book is for those who want the extra screen size and GeForce GTX 1060 for GPU rendering which is 9 (!) times faster than the intel chips.

The Samsung pen is essentially a mini Wacom pen, right? I’m perfectly happy with feel of Wacom pens, I use one every day, but I was pretty blown away the first time I used the Apple Pencil, which I initially expected to be just okay. It’s size, weight, and balance felt more comfortable and natural than the chunkier but lighter Wacom pen, and the build quality was unmatched. To each their own for sure, but to me the Pencil feels so good (and the Surface Pen - at least the old one - feels so bad) I’m willing to wait a bit longer for my best-case-scenario of Adobe CC on the iPad.