Participant

Question

Best laptop for creative suite cs6?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
July 17, 2012
7 replies
119010 views

I will be heading to college in September and wish to buy a new laptop and install creative suite production premium on it. I need a computer which will run fairly smoothly with production premium but possibly more importantly I need a computer which will last me my four years of undergraduate. My college offers special deals on apple and dell computers so I'm strongly considering buying a laptop from those brands but am willing to purchase my computer from another company if it's clear that the laptop would be longer lasting/good with production premium. I can afford a little above 2000 dollars for the computer but I won't likely be able to play around with the computer much to imporove things like memory so custimization is basically out. Here are the descriptions of four computers I was looking at were the macbook 15 and 13.3 as well as the new special addition 15r inspiration and the new xps 15. The new xps 15 at 2000 dollars seems the most powerful but my understanding is that macs have a longer lifespan. Any recomendations would be great thanks!

This topic has been closed for replies.

E

emanuelb54570030

Participant

Here's a good article detailing exactly the aspects you should focus on when buying a laptop for graphic design work: Student Computing Gear – Best Laptops for College in 2016

Hope it helps!

Bill Gehrke

Inspiring

Emanuel, did you realize that you responded to a 2-year old posting on a 4-year old thread?

E

emanuelb54570030

Participant

Wow... Thanks for letting me know. Didn't have my glasses on at the time

F

fitnessfun

Participant

There are a lot of sturdy, dependable laptops out there. My first year of college I bought a hp laptop and it was with me for all four years of school. One of the latest models is an HP Envy 17-3270NR. It's great with graphic design, but also with everyday schoolwork. Check it out and others I've been impressed with below.

http://www.squidoo.com/best-graphic-design-laptops

J

JFPhoton

Inspiring

.....we are talking about using CS6 here RIGHT ???.......only CERTAIN laptops will contain the necessary hardware to run PPro ,or, After Effects well. Some Apple products can work,but can be HANDICAPPED vs. a Windows laptop if there is no option for multiple hard drives or NVidia graphics cards....not to mention the Apple OS, which may not be as capable as Windows if it is not the most recent...AND the disdvantage of working with " Quirktime",or, having to transcode FIRST to Pro-Res before editing !!

.....in general, best to stick with a Windows machine, 32 GB system memory, NVidia GPU of the 7xx or 8xx mobile series,( 4 GB video memory is optimal...minimum 2GB of DDR 5 video memory ). The CPU should be the recent Haswell i7, giving over 3 ghz on turbo. Then, drive system is important. For good performance select a laptop that allows at least TWO hard drives....3 is better. An SSD as the "C" drive is best.....with either a larger capacity SSD as the second drive,or, if the budget is resricted, a large HDD as the second drive, (7,200 rpm MINIMUM ). FORGET ATI graphics cards OR " integrated" graphics....you WILL NEED the NVidia GPU to use the "Mercury Playback Engine" which renders video previews TEN TIMES FASTER using CUDA than CPU only rendering !! Best to go with a desktop system anyway.....a powerful laptop MUST be plugged in to edit.....the CPU gets THROTTLED while on battery, no matter HOW you set your " power preferences ".

R

rasmatazz_jr

Participant

Hi all, I am new here. I am looking at the MSI GT60-KWS-674US for a mobile unit to do Adobe CS6.

Here are the specs, what do you think.

Windows 7 Professional
Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ Processor
15.6" Full HD Anti-Reflective 95% NTSC
Display (16:9; 1920 x 1080)
NVIDIA® Quadro® K3100M (4GB DDR3 VRAM)
128GB SSD + 1TB HDD (7200 RPM)
16GB DDR3L 1600MHz System Memory

J

JFPhoton

Inspiring

.....look at the other post today ,"deciding on CPU and Memory for Laptop",by Peter Studt. You will see how he eventually bought a new Asus. His model just posted the highest laptop score on the video editing benchmark test, "PPBM5"....go to that website and look.

I saved a lot of money 2 years ago buying an Asus.....compare them to the Sagers, Clevos, Lenovos,etc. before deciding.

key factors : fastest i7 laptop CPU you can get

best NVidia 6xx series laptop GPU you can get.....more GPU memory, the better, esp. for After Effects....if 3 or 4GB possible, go for it!!

minimum 2 internal SATA III HDD bays......~ 256 SSD for OS,Programs, and pagefile only.....larger SSD : 512GB Marvell controlled Crucial M4 or better in 2nd bay for media, and rest of files.

Or, Seagate Momentus XT 750GB in 2nd bay for media....will be slower than SSD.

Min. 1920x1080 screen that is at least 17.3 inches.......smaller screens too hard to see without straining.

Max out system memory .....min. 16 GB, but, 32GB best....min. 1600 speed.

Hi-speed external port like eSATA or, USB 3 for external drives

HDMI port for viewing timeline window on an HDTV,or, external,large monitor

D

danolds

Participant

I looked at the ASUS back when I bought the Lenovo, but the 17" screen was too big for me. I had to be able to use the system on planes and a 15" screen is about as big as you can go - unless the guy in front of you feels like reclining. There are also some other Lenovo features that were important to me as a business user that would probably be less important to someone else.

I'd definitely agree with the comments about about getting the fastest CPU possible and a system with four DIMM slots. I'd also agree the GPU memory is important and more is better. Dual drive bays are a great feature, but make sure that the secondary drive bay operates at full speed. On some systems, the speed of the secondary bay was capped since they figured it was mainly going to be used with the DVD/CD drive.

You'll see some systems with Displayport output rather than HDMI. Don't worry about that, you can get a HDMI/Displayport adapter for a few bucks.

S

sinfony78

Participant

what exactly is the use of the second drive. is it to store all the media files? i'm just curious as to why one partitioned drive wouldn't be sufficient

D

danolds

Participant

I would suggest that you take a look at Lenovo's W530 Mobile Workstation models. They have solid processors, two drive slots, four memory slots, and are very durable. You can get a lot more machine for your money if you can handle some fairly simple upgrades on your own. I needed a laptop to handle Adobe a few years ago and here's what I did:

1. Shopped Lenovo's Outlet store and found a returned W510 (the best model at that time) that had the top processor/Quadro graphics combination. This saved about $500 vs. list price

2. Swapped out the memory, replacing the stock 4GB with 16GB to fill up all four DIMM slots. This was much less expensive than buying memory from Lenovo and works perfectly.

3. Bought a hard drive carrier for the Ultrabay slot (cost about $20 if I remember right). Then I bought a SSD to use as main drive and moved stock 300GB drive to the Ultrabay carrier - giving me two internal drives.

I've been using this system for a few years now and am very happy. It won't render as quickly as a desktop or a laptop that's using desktop processors or GPUs, but it has enough battery life (9 cell internal battery plus add-on 'slice' battery underneath) to handle a cross country flight without dying. All in, I think I ended up spending less than $2k on the hardware, upgrades, and accessories.

the_wine_snob

Inspiring

I have been using a Sager 17" laptop for about 5 years now. When purchased, it was their "top-o-the-line," with 3x 250GB SATA II's, nVidia GTX 8800M 512k, and 4GB RAM (running XP-Pro, which was a "special order," as Vista was the choice then). I use it to edit SD material, plus do much of my initial PS Image work, InDesign and AI vector illustrations, plus Encore authoring.

Now, it is VERY long in the tooth, and for the same $'s, one can get much, much more. Looking at both Sager & ADK for a replacement, and am only waiting on a change in the Clevo MoBo's, before I make the change to Win7-64 and the new laptop.

I can say that the Sager T/S and C/S are great, and judging from the work that the ADK folk do on this forum, would certainly anticipate the same, or maybe even better from them.

The only downside to such a unit, is the power consumption with a 3x HDD I/O. For me, I only use the laptop on my patio, so I am plugged into AC. It is also a tad heavy, were I running through airports, or trying to juggle things on an airliner's tray table. One thing that I have noticed is that many newer airplanes, like the 737-800/900's have AC between the seats!

Good luck,

Hunt

1

1982 GT

Participant

I am looking at purchasing a laptop to run Production Premium CS6. Below are the specs of a laptop that I'm thinking about - I would appreciate your feedback and thoughts as to wether or not this will handle CS6.

Thanks,

http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php

Bill Gehrke

Inspiring

Welcome to the forum

If you want this class of laptop guaranteed and properly configured to your workflow and media contact one of our frequent forum contributors Eric at ADK who has helped many happy users of these forums.

coonasty

Participant

just bought a sager notebook from xoticpc (clevo p170em model) and now that i got cuda working its really running my cs6 suite very nicely. my specs:

i7 3720qm

8gig ram (added 16gig more i had for 24gig total)

the good 17" screen (whatever it was)

nvidia 675m video 2gig vram (add the cuda hack to pp and ae)

500gig hard drive (i added a 750gig that i already had)

already had win 7 64bit

and none of the extra non-sense charges that you can waste money on if u choose

total was just a tad over $1800 with the discounts. i can go to 32gig ram later on if i choose, dont think ill notice much difference though. cpu and video card can be upgraded later on when new faster stuff comes out for a cheaper price

also bought a 2 terabyte external g-raid thats im hooking up through esata and thats what im working my projects off of to switch between my hex core desktop when im home. for video editing this thing runs better than i expected. definitely will get years of great use with this setup