At the beginning of this year, I was recommending some of the best laptops for 3D rendering on the market. We’re now close to the end of the year, and in the meantime the hardware has been upgraded with new performance parts. Let’s see what they are, and which notebooks come with the new hardware at this moment.
Intel Skylake CPUs. The 6th generation Core CPU line from Intel has been released and it’s already available in some notebooks from major manufacturers. The CPU that will most likely replace the most popular part in performance notebooks (i7-4720HQ) is the i7-6700HQ. It offers roughly the same performance, but the 14nm process brings a better power profile so it will add a bit to the battery life. Expect to see the 6700HQ as a mainstream CPU in gaming/performance notebooks released starting with this fall.
Intel booth at CES 2015 —Source: Flickr.com
The mobile Skylake lineup also contains two interesting launches. The first one is the i7-6820HK, which is the equivalent of the K desktop part—in other words, an overclockable mobile i7 CPU. So if you’re in the market for a performance 17″ notebook in the following months, keep an eye out for this one. The second notable launch for Skylake is the mobile Xeon line, which currently contains just two CPUs: E3-1505M v5 and E3-1535M v5. This means vPro, ECC memory and Thunderbolt 3 in a 45W TDP. Let’s see if this opens up a new niche in the business/pro notebook category.
NVidia GTX 980 Notebook. In an interesting move, NVidia has launched a desktop 980 card dedicated for… laptops. It’s the same chip used in the vanilla desktop version of the card, and it uses chips that have been tested for lower power consumption. It also has a different cooling solution, so it can fit in a laptop chassis. The official specs are advertising the same level of performance as the desktop part, but there is a catch: it also has the power requirements / thermal envelope of the desktop GTX 980, meaning 1.5x – 2x the power consumption of a 980M. This means that we’ll see it mostly in thick 17″ notebooks, but it’s still an interesting move. Oh, did I mention that the card will be overclockable as well? You can find it in notebooks from MSI and Clevo, like the GT72 Dominator Pro G or Clevo P870DM-G.
MSI GT72-s source msi.com
17″ UHD displays for laptops. Requested by users for years, they just became available now. One of the first laptops that can be configured with such a panel (from Au Optronics) is Clevo P870DM.
Clevo-P870DM source clevo.com.tw
Laptops with 64 GB of RAM. You still get 4 slots of memory, but each slot can now fit a 16GB stick. Useful if you are working with very large scenes.
The next big performance step will come with NVidia’s 2016 release, the Pascal architecture. I’ll be writing about it when it comes up, so make sure to keep close. In the meantime, most laptop manufacturers have updated their models for Skylake CPUs. If you’re buying a new laptop now and need the best performance, I’d take a good look at a i7-6820HK CPU with two GTX 980M in SLI. And the UHD panel sounds like a sweet spot for 17″ – I always felt that the 15″ high-res screens were a bit crammed. This combination will make for a balanced system with enough oomph, and you’ll avoid the power-hungry desktop parts (CPU and GPU). After all, these are laptops we’re talking about, right?
The general trend is for people to go mobile, and I’m glad to see that the manufacturers finally start to acknowledge this and take steps towards providing real mobile powerhouses. We’re not there yet, but things are on the right track and looking good.
