Laptop for Daz rendering?

[CaramelCowboy]

Hello everyone.

I do know that a desktop will be lightyears ahead of a laptop and is by far the superior choice.
HOWEVER

- I will be moving to another country as soon as the border opens and so I don't want to invest in a desktop that I can't take with me.
- Even if I manage to take hypothetical desktop, I'll constantly be on the move and will not be 'settling' down at one place for a long time.

My current laptop is an ancient piece of technology called the Lenovo y50-70. The ram is decent with 16gb but the gpu is depressing to say the least.
I've done a few fun renders but they start getting really laggy and often crash when I include terrain etc and so I ended up uninstalling daz as it only annoyed me more and took away the fun of making my scenes.

I'm now looking to buy a laptop. (wish it could be a desktop but )
My budget isn't huge since I have a lot of incoming expenses for when I do move.
I can only spend around 1500-1600$ USD.

I was wondering if any of you use laptops to render decent scenes. I'm not talking photorealisitc. I'm talking modern VN look and feel scenes. (AOA Academy , Leap of Faith, BADIK etc. Can't remember others right now)

I was looking at the legion y740 with a rtx 2070 but it's not easy finding those in my county and even the lenovo store has only y540 models and is not even willing to order new model so..

What laptops do you use/recommend for the purpose I mentioned above?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

It's mostly a waste of money.
Buy a random craptop and build a solid render box when you can.

 

[h0rnyc0der]

it is indeed mostly a waste of money, especially with the mobile Ampere cards being released in the next 3-6 months.

If you cant wait, i would recommend a Asus Rog Zephyrus G14 with a RTX2060 for the most mobility or a Asus Tuf Gaming A15 (or A17 for 17" screen) for best price/performance ratio.
If you are lucky, you might also find a MSI GS66 Stealth on sale.
It might also be worth to keep an eye on the dell/alienware website, they regularly do big sales with huge discounts to get rid of the remaining RTX 20 series laptops. You can also haggle with dell in chat or on the phone to get even more discounts, especially on Alienware models. A M15 R3 with up to a 2070 might come in budged range then (but make sure it a R3, not a R2).

Another opportunity might be cloud computing?
At shadow you get cloud PC with a desktop grade GTX 1080 for something like 13 bucks a month. (RTX2080 and Titan RTX coming in 2021 for 25 and 40 a month).
This would allow you to just carry something small, lightweight and cheap with you, like a Surface Go tablet or so, as long as you have stable internet available.

 

[CaramelCowboy]

it is indeed mostly a waste of money, especially with the mobile Ampere cards being released in the next 3-6 months.

If you cant wait, i would recommend a Asus Rog Zephyrus G14 with a RTX2060 for the most mobility or a Asus Tuf Gaming A15 (or A17 for 17" screen) for best price/performance ratio.
If you are lucky, you might also find a MSI GS66 Stealth on sale.
It might also be worth to keep an eye on the dell/alienware website, they regularly do big sales with huge discounts to get rid of the remaining RTX 20 series laptops. You can also haggle with dell in chat or on the phone to get even more discounts, especially on Alienware models. A M15 R3 with up to a 2070 might come in budged range then (but make sure it a R3, not a R2).

Another opportunity might be cloud computing?
At shadow you get cloud PC with a desktop grade GTX 1080 for something like 13 bucks a month. (RTX2080 and Titan RTX coming in 2021 for 25 and 40 a month).
This would allow you to just carry something small, lightweight and cheap with you, like a Surface Go tablet or so, as long as you have stable internet available.

Thank you for the replies guys. I'll also be using the laptop for some gaming and this just popped up while I was browsing.

Lenovo Legion 5Pi 10th Gen Intel Core i7
16GB/1TB SSD/144 Hz
NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB GDDR6 Graphics


Would this be decent for what i'm looking for?

It's about 1800$ usd. I understand a laptop isn't the best option and might be a waste but it's all I can work with right now. I really cant stand slow machines so i'm willing to blow this money away until I settle down and have space for a desktop.

I also checked shadow and it's not available in my country sadly but i'm really curious about it and hope it comes here soon

 

[h0rnyc0der]

Thank you for the replies guys. I'll also be using the laptop for some gaming and this just popped up while I was browsing.

Lenovo Legion 5Pi 10th Gen Intel Core i7
16GB/1TB SSD/144 Hz
NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB GDDR6 Graphics


Would this be decent for what i'm looking for?

It's about 1800$ usd. I understand a laptop isn't the best option and might be a waste but it's all I can work with right now. I really cant stand slow machines so i'm willing to blow this money away until I settle down and have space for a desktop.

I also checked shadow and it's not available in my country sadly but i'm really curious about it and hope it comes here soon

If you go for RTX2060, then you should take a laptop with a Ryzen CPU, either 4800H/HS or 4900H/HS, they outperform intel CPU´s by a huge margin. Even if you are not mainly looking for CPU performance, the gain is so huge that you should not ignore it.

But a RTX2070 might also be available at that price and since theres is currently no laptop out there with a Ryzen CPU and a GPU higher than 2060, you would have to go with an Intel CPU.
Just dont go with a 2060paired with an Intel CPU, it would be wasted.

Where are you from? Just because shadow is not officially available in your country, it doesnt mean it would not work.

 

[CaramelCowboy]

If you go for RTX2060, then you should take a laptop with a Ryzen CPU, either 4800H/HS or 4900H/HS, they outperform intel CPU´s by a huge margin. Even if you are not mainly looking for CPU performance, the gain is so huge that you should not ignore it.

But a RTX2070 might also be available at that price and since theres is currently no laptop out there with a Ryzen CPU and a GPU higher than 2060, you would have to go with an Intel CPU.
Just dont go with a 2060paired with an Intel CPU, it would be wasted.

Where are you from? Just because shadow is not officially available in your country, it doesnt mean it would not work.

India right now but i'll be moving to New Zealand in a few months. There's an HP Omen with pretty much the same config as the one i mentioned but it comes with a Ryzen processor. It's hardly ever available so I didn't consider that one. Didn't knoe ryzen vs intel made that much of a difference. Might just try to get my hands on that one

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

Try getting a laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 port; that way you can extend the GPU later with an external eGPU when you can afford it. The MSI Stealth range is a good set of laptops if you can find one. Steer clear of Razer laptops as they have thermal issues. (Which can be a problem when rendering)