Portable PC for 3D Animation, Adobe, and SFX.

[Guest]

Hey good people of the LTT forum. Been a while and I have a question. I am an animation student looking for a portable animation/light render machine. I know how stupid it may sound but I need something that I can take with me to work, school, etc and to still be able to work on my animations or Adobe stuff specifically 3D animation. The current setup I have is a desktop with a gtx 770 4GB, 16GB of ram, and a i7 4790k in it. That desktop is fine for the work I do for now and is essentially my render/gaming machine so I am looking for a laptop that can run my projects in their respective software and not chug along if I may have multiple pieces of software open. The software I use is 3DS Max, Blender, Poser, Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, Premier, Animate, Dreamweaver, Indesign and Illustrator. Out of those programs listed I think the Autodesk and Adobe programs are the biggest resource hogs. I tried looking around but don't trust myself when it comes to laptops or a random "top 10 laptops for animators list" and was hoping people that require a similar machine or know more about beefier laptops could enlighten me. Price isn't really an issue I just need to know what i'm working with. Any suggestions would be helpful!

[Flygenring]

Any of the beefy gaming laptops with desktop hardware in them would do the job, but if you need something lighter you might wanna look into a workstation laptop like the ones Dell and Hp makes. You really need something with a GPU or dGPU,  preferrably an Nvidia one because of CUDA acceleration. The Dell XPS 15 would be great if you don't need to do heavy video or 3d rendering.

[JFischer00]

2 minutes ago, CaptainFox77 said:

 - SNIP -

There are plenty of laptops that have desktop i7-6700K CPUs and desktop GTX 1080 GPUs. That combined with 32GB DDR4 RAM should be plenty of power for anything.

[Guest]

How are Macbooks for this particular thing? I'm neutral when it comes to Apple stuff and my professor uses Apple all of the time and prefers them but I wasn't sure as far as Rendering 3D and multitasking heavy software like that if a Macbook would be any better or if I'm just shooting myself in the foot in terms of performance/compatibility and added price.

[Hafun]

1 hour ago, CaptainFox77 said:

How are Macbooks for this particular thing? I'm neutral when it comes to Apple stuff and my professor uses Apple all of the time and prefers them but I wasn't sure as far as Rendering 3D and multitasking heavy software like that if a Macbook would be any better or if I'm just shooting myself in the foot in terms of performance/compatibility and added price.

Macbook is only about estetics and PRICE. Hardware is same as in every other laptop. I will go with dell or hp with good cpu and gpu (dedicated gpu ofc). Now the only thing that u have to concider is the price. Workstation laptops are usually expensive (new) but u can find good deals on 2-3 years old models.