Need reccomendations on buying a laptop

#1

Hi, I’m a student from Belgium in Game & Art Design. In my 2,5 years of the curriculum I’ve been able to keep up with a simple Asus from a college shop. Lately though it has been giving up on me because the hardware can’t follow on the heavy tasks I give it. Now I know that I want to continue doing this study and potentially look for a job in the CG business, so I’m looking for a new laptop (because I have to stay mobile for at least 2 more years).

THE IMPORTANT PART STARTS HERE

Currently I’m running an internship at Gabari (http://gabari.be/), a company that makes high quality renders for the real-estate market. I’m mainly using Max, Corona, Zbrush, Photoshop,… to render the images (gonna try out Modo this summer). Anyways, I need some help with choosing a laptop.

So I went to the nearest store, where I trust the owners for giving me reasonable advice in the past and they showed me mainly asus models (because they were presented as demo’s). The best model (at a fair price) was this one:
http://us.hardware.info/productinfo/200652/asus-n750jv-t4055h#tab:specifications I’m willing to go up to 1500€

I’m not super up to date on hardware specs, but I know enough to gues what’s important. Still I’ve got a few questions regarding specifications:

1 8GB RAM is not all that much, but not entirely bad either -> should I upgrade it to 16GB?

2 Will a NVIDIA GeForce GT750M with 2GB DDR3 VRAM suffice? Or is it better to look for a 3GB DDR 5 version?

3 If iI buy this laptop I’m also installing a samsung 250 GB SSD (more space on the SSD), which I think, isn’t a bad idea?

4 I think the CPU looks alright, am I right?

I’ve also been looking around on forums for recommendations, some people mentioned laptops from Origin and Lenovo. I don’t really like ordering from another country, but I would like your opinion nonetheless. Are they worth looking into? Also, feel free to give a recomendation of your own, but keep my max budget (1500€) in mind if you do.

Thanks in advance!

#2

You’re using a CPU renderer and potentially going out to high res prints, yes, you most likely should.

2 Will a NVIDIA GeForce GT750M with 2GB DDR3 VRAM suffice? Or is it better to look for a 3GB DDR 5 version?

Neither ZBrush or your renderer make any use of a GPU, if you’re trying to save, that’s a good first thing to save on.

3 If iI buy this laptop I’m also installing a samsung 250 GB SSD (more space on the SSD), which I think, isn’t a bad idea?

An SSD will generally make things a bit snappier and smoother feeling, but won’t necessarily net you much in terms of performance. It is nice to have though for the speed boot, paging, opening apps and so on happen when you have one.

4 I think the CPU looks alright, am I right?

Yes, it’s a pretty good mobile CPU with respectable power management.

I’ve also been looking around on forums for recommendations, some people mentioned laptops from Origin and Lenovo. I don’t really like ordering from another country, but I would like your opinion nonetheless. Are they worth looking into? Also, feel free to give a recomendation of your own, but keep my max budget (1500€) in mind if you do.

Thanks in advance!

If you don’t want to go for freakbeast machines and budgets the playing field sort of levels out a fair bit, and brands with exotic or niche offers become less relevant.
If you value a local warranty, and the price is good, then you don’t really have much reason to look elsewhere once you’ve done the whole pricing comparison dance.
Asus produces solid laptops in that range, and on laptops a local warranty is valuable enough.

#3

Wow thanks for the very fast response! I’m good to go then I guess :slight_smile: