Laptop purchase help

Gamer laptops usually have a lot of LED lighting elements like on the lid, sides and keyboards that you can customize. Gamers like that stuff.

lmao Hahahhaha ok ok I see. I assumed the 3050 was better than the 2070 because of the higher model number. So in Rhino 7 I understand they have a Raytrace renderer now built in. The 2070 will handle that fine also?

30XX just means itā€™s in the latest series not necessarily an improvement. According to benchmarks the 2070 and 2070super outperform the 3050. (And you can get them cheaper since they are not the latest series) The 3070 would be the improvement over the 2070. Yes is will raytrace fine.

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Thanks Michael, Iā€™m going to do some research on those 2 laptops you recommended.

To keep it easy you can presume that the new generation is one ā€œstepā€ faster than the previous generation, but uses less power. (And the previous gen might lack some features)

So:
3050 = 2060 = 1070
3060 = 2070 = 1080
3070 = 2080 = 1080 ti

If you research online you will see that this isnā€™t that simple, and that there are multiple configurations of say 3050 with different core speeds, power consumptions and vram amounts. And then there are TI versions and Super versions of the different GPUā€™s too. But the big difference between the 10xx generation and the 20xx and 30xx is that the 10xx doesnā€™t have dedicated raytracing cores. (And nVidia threw in the 16xx series too, they are bascially 20xx cards without raytracing cores (RTX)) But they all have CUDA cores, and these the the most commonly used for rendering right now anyway.

Another interesting, low budget machine is the MSI katana, but read up on them. This is a good review:

To me screen quality and noise levels are paramount on laptops. And I choose FullHD screens as 4K is to me a waste of power and time when rendering. (More pixles take more time and requires a faster GPU). I once had a SONY laptop with ā€œeverythingā€, but it had a terribly uninteresting screen, horrendous battery life and sounded like an airplane. (Too big CPU and GPU) So I swapped to a machine with a beautifull screen, lower power and noice and longer battery life. Now I have a Razer which serves me well, but the keyboard is a bit to dim/dark to code efficiently in low light conditions.
(Oh, and it lacks a numeric pad, so I use an USB one, so we all have to figure out what is on top of our priority list and live with the consequences that there is no perfect laptop that has everything you wish for both now and in the future :wink: )
Good luck!

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Agree with this. Used to be a Asus fan till they dumbly removed integrated cameras from the laptops (at a time the whole world is on Zoom :man_shrugging:t2:) MSI is killing it lately with some solid machines.

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Hey Michael can you send me a few models that will test my laptop out. Like different sized models to see where my breaking point is as far as display freezing up or CPU being taxed too much? For example models that run smooth on your computer but may lag on a cheaper computer.

Pulled the trigger on one of these, totally satisfied, thanks for the tip @Michael_Pryor. Amazon had no stock last week, Newegg did. Unfortunately it looks like the ā€œRTX 2070 Super, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSDā€ variant is back on the hard to find list in the wild atm. RTX is a step change (hopefully not just for games), but in general always buy ā€œlast years modelā€, this is a perfect example.

RGB Party easily disabled with FN key toggle. 30% faster than my Xeon W-2125 workstation. Iā€™ve been a Desktop workstation hold-out for decades, going forward desktops are dead to me.

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Itā€™s a great machine!

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RGB would increase you FBS in Gaming :heart_eyes: :star_struck:

You can indeed overpower a laptop. An overpowered windows laptop makes hell of a noise even on IDLE state. If you plan to work 35-45 hours a week in front of such a machine, I would definitely also consider checking thermal management, ergonomics, power consumption etc. If most of your work is on a fixed office location, an external GPU might be a better choice. What people tend to forget is, that unless you do edge-case computation like realistic Rendering, VR and Generative Design, you donā€™t need that much power. Medium spec PC are totally fine for general modelling. Of course, once you need that power you are in trouble. This is why it is really a matter of your daily business. There are tons of alternatives.

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Congrats , thatā€™s a good machine , now Iā€™m jealous

In general, among the range of which you can choose a laptop for study or work for every taste, color and purse.