looking for opinions or facts/proff that "gaming" laptops are better for mobile rendering or content creation than say a macbook air.

[ParticlePhysicist]

Sorry for me this is simple more power means faster rendering times means better productivity but i recently got into a heated debate about this with an acquaintance of mine. Maybe I'm wrong maybe a thin laptop can be used to edit 4k video or auto CAD inventor in decent time. Please help me out haha

[Sauron]

There is nothing to debate, better specs perform better. Now, if the laptop in question has a better gpu while the macbook has a better cpu (for example) then the mac will perform better in cpu intensive tasks. But other than that, there is no room for discussion.

 

As for editing 4k video, you can do it on virtually any intel compatible hardware, what changes are render times and how smooth the experience is. It also depends a lot on what software and filters you use. Assuming equal software and settings, a more powerful computer will perform better (storage speeds matter too though).

 

I would not recommend a macbook air for CAD. You'd probably want either the higher end macbook pros with the quad cores or just a mobile workstation with maybe a quadro in it if you don't require mac os.

[ParticlePhysicist]

yeah what i thought as well..i told him i want the asus g800vi as my workstation laptop and gor gaming..i feel its a good choice for powerful rendering both in 3d and for certain calculations and auto cad etc..but i also may be wrong. If you've other suggestions that would be cool.

[don_svetlio]

What is your budget and what do you want from your laptop?

[ParticlePhysicist]

i want to run Inventor as well a CAD and MAYBE for some physics calculations and software for when and if i need to do some work on the road without access to my home comp. and of course gaming for when i want to relax on the road. budget around...i would say 3-4k. I mostly use laptops in hotels or on the plane if i can...or the he train. (long distance train)

[don_svetlio]

Just now, ParticlePhysicist said:

i want to run Inventor as well a CAD and MAYBE for some physics calculations and software for when and if i need to do some work on the road without access to my home comp. and of course gaming for when i want to relax on the road. budget around...i would say 3-4k. I mostly use laptops in hotels or on the plane if i can...or the he train. (long distance train)

If you want thin and light - Dell XPS 15 or Asus ZenBook Pro UX501VW

If you want powerful - consult @D2ultima for a Clevo

[ParticlePhysicist]

pardon my ignorence but what is a clevo?

 

[don_svetlio]

4 minutes ago, ParticlePhysicist said:

pardon my ignorence but what is a clevo?

 

The only laptop manufacturer who can keep Pascal cool

[ParticlePhysicist]

ok thank you : )

[Pendragon]

5 hours ago, ParticlePhysicist said:

Sorry for me this is simple more power means faster rendering times means better productivity but i recently got into a heated debate about this with an acquaintance of mine. Maybe I'm wrong maybe a thin laptop can be used to edit 4k video or auto CAD inventor in decent time. Please help me out haha

CAD inventor is 100% more specs more power.

Video editing is another story. 

 

For your purposes, @don_svetlio is correct, a Macbook will do you nothing.

For your friend's purposes, 4k editing, he could be correct. Mac OSX has a video editing program called Final Cut Pro that is so optimized for OSX that it's hardware accelerated with background rendering always enabled in addition to other optimizations allow it to make a joke out of alot of Windows laptops on Preimere. So for video editing, hardware doesn't necessary play as big as a role you would think. It's all about the optimizations and OS. A 12in Macbook with a core m on FCP will outedit a beast of a machine on the Windows side purely because of FCP.

[ParticlePhysicist]

thank you for the information its most helpful. : )

[D2ultima]

On 9/18/2016 at 9:15 AM, Sauron said:

Now, if the laptop in question has a better gpu while the macbook has a better cpu (for example) then the mac will perform better in cpu intensive tasks

Actually, considering that Macs aren't designed to allow their CPUs to run anywhere near high performance levels, and forcing it will cause thermal shutdown as fast as 5 seconds (a fellow forum user on NBR installed windows on a macbook and ran throttlestop, which is a program that can be used to force CPUs to maintain their clockspeeds, and used its built in benchmark TSBench which is a middle of the road stress for CPUs in terms of heat and power draw, and ended up getting thermal throttling in 1 second and a thermal shutdown in 5... and this is with the machine's cooling system slightly modified for better cooling), if you're PURELY considering CPU-based workloads on a macbook, and not the hugely hardware-accelerated programs that most mac users use, then the macbook if lucky might perform like a windows laptop with a ULV CPU.

 

They are not meant for any sort of performance whatsoever.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, D2ultima said:

Actually, considering that Macs aren't designed to allow their CPUs to run anywhere near high performance levels, and forcing it will cause thermal shutdown as fast as 5 seconds (a fellow forum user on NBR installed windows on a macbook and ran throttlestop, which is a program that can be used to force CPUs to maintain their clockspeeds, and used its built in benchmark TSBench which is a middle of the road stress for CPUs in terms of heat and power draw, and ended up getting thermal throttling in 1 second and a thermal shutdown in 5... and this is with the machine's cooling system slightly modified for better cooling), if you're PURELY considering CPU-based workloads on a macbook, and not the hugely hardware-accelerated programs that most mac users use, then the macbook if lucky might perform like a windows laptop with a ULV CPU.

 

They are not meant for any sort of performance whatsoever.

Yes, throttling is a factor but apple is not the only manufacturer who does it by any stretch. With proper testing you'd find a lot of the competition also throttles under full load. Either way that depends on the specific machines, with "better cpu" I meant better cpu performance.

[D2ultima]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Yes, throttling is a factor but apple is not the only manufacturer who does it by any stretch. With proper testing you'd find a lot of the competition also throttles under full load. Either way that depends on the specific machines, with "better cpu" I meant better cpu performance.

I don't think you understand the point at which the throttling occurs. Their notebooks aren't even designed to use half of their CPUs' strength. They're designed for very light loads and to otherwise use hardware acceleration on everything. It doesn't actually matter whether they're using a ULV chip or a full chip for 99% of workloads. The full chips can't hold their power, or half of it.

 

There's a difference between barely-working machines like Razer's craptops and gigabyte's slim lines. Those are not meant for anything beyond light loads, certainly, but they don't thermal shutdown in 5 seconds on a benchmark with better-than-stock cooling. Then there's Macbooks, which do. There's a VERY key difference here.

 

You are saying that if a better CPU in a Macbook (let's say an i7-6700HQ) were to run a CPU-based load without using hardware acceleration to supplement the workload and compare it to say a ULV chip like an i7-6500U in some Dell laptop, that the Macbook would do better. I'm saying that is false, because for the Macbook's CPU to surpass the Dell ULV CPU, it would need to be functioning above 50% capacity (3.1GHz 4-core load at ~52% or higher on all 8 threads) without throttling or shutting down. I'm saying that the Macbook cannot handle such a performance load, because the laptop is not designed to use its CPU for anything that isn't 100% necessary to use the CPU for.