A Laptop for 3D Animation / Film Editing / Rendering

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XeeN

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 7, 2004
Messages
238
Hi guys,

I'm thinking about getting a laptop in the next year to be able to work on my animation and film projects while on the road and away from home. This is looking like it's going to have to be a $3-4k investment which is slightly depressing, but I want to do my research.

I've looked around and found some laptops that are built for this sort of thing but the only difference I see is usually the video card being a quadro or some improved RAM speeds.

Anyone have a comparison with getting a good laptop that I can game on in spare time vs. performance if I had a laptop with one of the video cards designed for open-gl / directx program environments and live rendering while working in programs like 3DS Max, Maya, etc.?

I've looked at Alienware and Dell so far. I'm also interested to find out what processor I should wait for... this "yonah" I hear about on these forums, for instance. I also am an Intel-faithful but would be willing to consider going AMD.

Thanks for any input!
 
I do alot of 3d rendering and I have to say my mobile athlon keeps up wonderfully for smaller simpler renders, I use photochop, 3d studio max 7 with mental ray to render and also cool edit for editing the audio for those 3d animation. The only thing is that I might have to look into a quad processor system because I cant take how long it takes for big renders( 48-72 hours) maybe I need to optimise my 3d scenes some huh.

I would gradly benchmark if you want me to.
 
For renders I do have a desktop and I'd probably end up setting up a dual processor machine with nothing fancy in it just for processing power if I got to that point.

At this point I'm ok with letting projects render overnight on my desktop. On a laptop/desktop I might also try the whole network-team render thing if I could get that to work.

Thanks Foz2001 for the advice on the xps m series...

Grazehell, how do your scenes do when you're looking at them in 3ds max? Are they choppy while you're moving your objects/camera view around?

What about processor types out now and what's coming out in the future?

Do you guys, having looked at the roadmap for Intel/AMD, see any mobile processors that should really rock for power + power consumption levels?

At this point it seems like I'll have to give up on mobile processors and go with a desktop replacement that just uses a normal P4 or AMD chip and runs about 30-60 minutes on a battery...

Any suggestions?
 
No the viewport is never choppy, I would have thrown whatever system I was using out the windows if my viewport had problems.
Back in the day when I was using max 4 with my old Barton 2600+ and a Geforce card Nivida released a driver that total messed up my viewport it would not refresh and all sorts of nonsense but when they updated the driver it fix the problem.
 
The dual processor systems should be out next year by the time you need to purchase.

I myself am in the same boat, except I do heavy CPU audio stuff. I cant live with current systems (my x64 barely keeps up now) but im hoping those next gen dual laptops will cater to us who need a little more speed. On the bright side, I dont need one of those 1000$ 7800 vid cards for a laptop!
 
gemini8026 said:
The dual processor systems should be out next year by the time you need to purchase.

I myself am in the same boat, except I do heavy CPU audio stuff. I cant live with current systems (my x64 barely keeps up now) but im hoping those next gen dual laptops will cater to us who need a little more speed. On the bright side, I dont need one of those 1000$ 7800 vid cards for a laptop!
Click to expand...


Yeah - regarding video card, hopefully by next year there will be a fair balance to the prices of the video card.

So by dual proc do you mean single chip dual core?
 
XeeN said:
Hi guys,

I'm thinking about getting a laptop in the next year to be able to work on my animation and film projects while on the road and away from home. This is looking like it's going to have to be a $3-4k investment which is slightly depressing, but I want to do my research.

I've looked around and found some laptops that are built for this sort of thing but the only difference I see is usually the video card being a quadro or some improved RAM speeds.

Anyone have a comparison with getting a good laptop that I can game on in spare time vs. performance if I had a laptop with one of the video cards designed for open-gl / directx program environments and live rendering while working in programs like 3DS Max, Maya, etc.?

I've looked at Alienware and Dell so far. I'm also interested to find out what processor I should wait for... this "yonah" I hear about on these forums, for instance. I also am an Intel-faithful but would be willing to consider going AMD.

Thanks for any input!
Click to expand...



Some of IBM's high end laptops have workstation cards in them

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/thinkpad/tseries_byo.html?&ca=lmbitpt&me=W&met=inli&re=tptevp

You can build on yourself.

Alienware=No
Dell=Propably Not

Look at IBM.

That said, a laptop is NOT all that good for these aplications.
 
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