New Laptop for Modelling and Rendering

[f.smith]

Hi,

I'm looking to get a new laptop as I'll be needing to work away from my home desktop.

I'll need it mostly for architectural modelling in apps like Rhino 3D & Revit, and rendering, mostly with Vray. At the moment my home build desktop with an i7 7700k, 32gb ram and a GTX 1080 does an ok job but the Dell workstations at my last job had 8 core Xeons, 64gb ram and Quadros so seemed faster and more stable for some single core apps and a lot faster for rendering. So I'm wondering if its worth trying to replicate the performance of the tower workstations in my new laptop, by purchasing a maxed out dell precision 7560 ~£4500 or if this is a waste of money and I should instead settle for a decent new XPS ~£2000, or maybe a cheaper Precision model, and find ways of utilising my existing desktop compute power in tandem like using a remote connection or distributed rendering.

Slimness, weight and battery life are not hugely important to me, it just needs to be reasonably portable, although carrying around something worth £4500 in a backpack seems a bit crazy. My main concern is value for money and longevity, I could stomach the price of the 7560 if it were to likely to retain top of the range performance for the next 5 years or so but I'm not too familiar with how quickly hardware develops / becomes out of date (i.e. if intel 13th gen revolutionises cpu rendering, or if an xps matches the specs in 2023, I will feel pretty stupid).

Other options might be to get a gaming laptop but I haven't looked into this much.

Additionally I'm soon moving to Germany from UK is anyone aware if there is likely to be any price differential?

Apologies for slightly nebulous subjective question but any thoughts and advice is much appreciated. Happy to clarify any ambiguity. Hopefully this thread is useful to others.

 

[Eximo]

If you are using it professionally, go with a Precision (or similar from another vendor), and pay for the extended warranty.

Doesn't necessarily have to be maxed out, but you could save a little money by say, ordering the smallest amount of memory and storage and then upgrading it yourself to 64GB and slapping in your own SSD. But for the CPU and GPU, pretty much stuck with what they have to offer.

Late model unlocked laptop i7 have 8 cores, you could also take a look at an AMD Ryzen based system.

Quadros are nice, but they generally cost 3 or 4 times the price of the similar performance gaming GPUs, so you really have to check your tools to see how much they benefit from the drivers and unlocked features. Really getting more VRAM might be the most important thing here, at least from what I have seen of recent 3D modeling tools, makes generating those previews a lot better.

 

[f.smith]

Thanks for your response Eximo, I saw the new Asus Pro Art models suggested in another thread, the W7600 could be a suitable compromise. The warranty is definitely important to me so I will have to look into what Asus offer when they become available. Anyone know when these are expected to retail in Europe?

 

[logainofhades]

Personally, I would look into what Lenovo has to offer.

 

[Eximo]

Not personally used a late model Lenovo mobile workstation. Dell and HP is what has been traditionally used at work. We had some nice D30 Lenovo workstations, but that was a while back (and they kind of sucked with a RAID 5 array of WD Raptors, always breaking)

My brother generally buys high end 'gaming' ASUS laptops. Runs schematic and board layout software, GPU gets used to do the pathing on circuit boards and 3D renders.

 

[logainofhades]

All the laptops, and workstations, where I work, are lenovo. I have a Lenovo Legion gaming laptop myself.