Which laptop? Is dedicated graphics vital for Adobe Creative Cloud?

Report · Sep 10, 2018

Hi,

I'm about to start a fine art university course and I need a laptop that can run Adobe Creative Cloud,

i'd like to keep costs as low as possible whilst still having the power to run Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere.

I have found three laptops:

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This first laptop has 8GB RAM, which i've heard is about the minimum you'd need to run a program like Illustrator,

and it also has the Intel Core i7 (8th gen), which claims to be able to handle 4K media editing and creation, which sounds quite promising,

it has a 256gb SSD, which will be useful as I think Adobe CC uses a lot of scratch disk space.

There is also a £450 version with Intel Core i5 as opposed to this £679 version, but I'm not sure the i5 would be powerful enough.

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For just over £100 more I can get an HP pavilion laptop with essentially the same specs but with a dedicated graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce MX130 2GB).

However, £800 is looking like quite a lot to pay on top of also needing a new camera and having some money left over for other things I need to buy,

so I was wondering how vital it is that my laptop have dedicated graphics to run Adobe CC? From my own research, i've read that Photoshop makes use

of it for more intensive tasks like 3D rendering, but RAM, SSD and processor are more important in general for Adobe programs, especially Illustrator.

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The last laptop has 16GB of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce MX130 4GB graphics card, the rest of the specs being the same as the last. Like I said before,

I am on a budget, so the £900 price tag, whilst decent for what i'm getting, is a bit steep still, so I'd only get this if this was the bare minimum I needed

to do my work. With 16GB of RAM, I'm confident that this laptop would be able to run Adobe CC with pretty much no problems, but if I did really need to do

such demanding tasks, I could always borrow a laptop or computer at the uni occasionally, so i'm not sure this one is worth the purchase unless absolutely needed.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on these three laptops and perhaps any suggestions for laptops I haven't found that are better value.

Thanks,

Caleb

Report · Sep 10, 2018

[moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to Hardware Forum]