For me, choosing the right notebook is always more difficult than building (or buying) a desktop. The customization options are often restrictive, and similar configurations from different manufacturers can be priced very differently. Plus, the prices are always higher than a similarly spec’ed desktop and the upgrade possibilities are in some cases almost nonexistent. All this means that a lot of research is needed before taking out the wallet, and a lot of people might find this difficult.
Because lately I’ve heard the question ‘what laptop should I buy for Blender?’ a lot, I decided to look a bit into the matter. Read on to hear my take on this.
Note: This applies to all rendering engines that work with NVidia GPUs. Also, I won’t be talking about Macs here, as they don’t have any configuration with a decent NVidia GPU at this point.
NVidia GTX 980m official image and source.
The 900m series GPUs from NVidia has been paper-launched a couple of months ago, but the notebooks including it are just starting to appear now. This is a significant release, as it comes with an architecture change (as opposed to overclocking and rebranding the old generation cards). The new cards will offer more performance, and, will produce significantly less heat. This means that, with this generation, you won’t have to carry around a 5kg (11 lbs) brick if you want to be able to actually work on it too. That being said, let’s get technical!
There are three notebook GPUs available from the current Maxwell line of products: the 860m (I know, confusing, right?), the 970m and the top of the line 980m. For performance reasons, I would only recommend the 970m and 980m, so I will focus on them for the rest of this article. Most users will want to hold on to their notebooks for 2 or 3 years, and it makes sense to buy a performant one that can be used the entire period of time.
Configuration-wise, both cards exist in soldered version, as well as in MXM version. The soldered version is not upgrade-able, while the MXM version can be, in theory, swapped with a new card in the future. There are also different RAM configurations: the 970m comes in 3GB and 6GB versions, while the 980m comes in 4GB and 8GB versions. Each notebook manufacturer chooses the variant they want to include in their products.
Let’s see what choices we have available for the other components of the laptop:
The CPU that is offered by a vast majority of the manufacturers as primary (or sole) option is the Intel i7-4710HQ/MQ. The CPU has a few siblings you may also find: the i7-4870HQ (which has Iris Pro as a graphic card instead of the classical Intel HD Graphics 4600) and the i7-4720HQ, with a slightly raised clock speed. You can find more CPU options, including a desktop one, in barebones manufacturers like Clevo/Sager.
The memory is in most cases limited to 16GB. This happens because these notebooks are labeled as ‘gaming machines’, and 16GB seem adequate for this purpose. You can find 32GB machines from a few manufacturers though: Asus ROG series, MSI GT/GS series, Clevo / Sager, Gigabyte and Alienware (if you are willing to do the upgrade by yourself). I didn’t include here the ‘business/CAD’ notebooks with Quadro video cards because I don’t think they offer the best bang for the buck.
The disk options range between a single SATA HDD and 4 fully configurable drives on M2 and SATA interfaces. One of the most popular combos is one 256GB SSD + one 1TB HDD, but your should choose the configuration that suits you (and your budget) best. Speed chart (high to low) is: SSD on PCI Express interface (some of the M2 slots offer this), SSD on SATA3 interface, SSD on SATA2 interface, 7200rpm HDD, 5400/5000/4600/green HDD.
The second part of this article (coming soon) will give my personal recommendations for a few notebooks that I believe are worth your money, and (hopefully) some Blender benchmarks. Stay tuned!
Update: The benchmarks have been published, you can see them here . The second part of the article is also live now, you can find it here.
