Best Laptops For 3D Rendering + Modeling

Hello everybody.

I am an industrial designer looking for recommendations on laptops that are good enough for the following:

  • heavy 3D rendering (Keyshot 7.0)
  • 3D modeling (Rhinoceros 5.0)
  • Photoshop and illustrator

I am concern about the speed of the laptop as I need it to be fast enough for a good render (say 20-30mins?), occasional heavy photoshop work and price should ideally be at most SGD2000 but I am okay with it being slightly above.

I am currently looking at ASUS Vivobook pro 15 N580VD and Dell Precision M5510 but I am not sure if they are good enough for my requirements. Please let me know if u guys have any suggestions. Thank you!

I am concern about the speed of the laptop as I need it to be > fast enough for producing cello music > (say 20-30mins?), occasional heavy photoshop work and price should ideally be at most SGD2000 but I am okay with it being slightly above.

Well I was using my MacBook air for simple 3d printing with Cura so I would say if you get lucky, get a 16mb MacBook air. For now, anything with 16mb ram or more is enough. For a pc though, I would double that.

Hi Alexxxis

I recently bought a Surface Pro for one of our companies and it is great as a general designer tool.
The basic model is well in your budget and has 128Gb SSD with 8Gb RAM, which suffices for ‘normal’ work.
It has a 8th gen Intel quadcore processor which is almost 1.5 times better than my octacore laptop which I currently use for CPU rendering (Keyshot).

Well I was using my MacBook air for simple 3d printing with Cura so I would say if you get lucky, get a 16mb MacBook air. For now, anything with 16mb ram or more is enough. For a pc though, I would double that.

This is absolutely horrible advice that is factually incorrect.
Firstly, Macbook air is probably one of the worst choices for anything 3D because of a very underpowered chipset that is compromising on performance in favor of battery life and second, the RAM usage and need of windows or mac is almost identical. 8GB is enough for most, 16GB is the optimum for bigger workloads and 32GB only really makes sense in huge, powerful desktop Workstation setups.
There is already a thread about this topic here somewhere.

This is complete crap. Every second thread in the tech forum asks the same question and there are plenty of answers.

In my opinion, every laptop at that price range offers similar performance, so get whatever you like the most. A mid range laptop, while it may adequately run the software, will never truely have the performance or cooling nessessary for heavy psd or keyshot work. Although I wouldn’t consider a 30 min render anywhere near ‘heavy’, so that is subjective.

I have an HP Zbook Studio 360 on the way - by the specs it should be capable of delivering on the OP’s requirements. We’ll see.

The Z book looks pretty amazing.