Help with choosing a laptop?

Development World Creation
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1

Hi,

I’m currently studying games design at uni going into my second year. And I’m looking for a laptop ready to start the new year,

In the first year we used unreal for block outs mainly but later on started to create a level with assets we were given. I did some modelling projects that we had to take into unreal and create a scene with we did use Nanite for one of the projects.

I do have a desktop at home that runs unreal perfectly fine and I can do the heavier tasks on that.

I’m looking to buy a laptop that I can just take to a cafe and work on assignments and small projects for myself, and tbh I’m at a brick wall I’ve got 3 in mind but want to here some other opinions on the ones I’ve seen / not seen that might be worth looking at.

LOQ Gaming Laptop - 15.6in FHD 144Hz, GeForce RTX 4050 6gbVRAM, AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB RAM DDR5, 1TB SSD

LENOVO LOQ 15.6" Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen 7, RTX 4070 8gbVRAM, 16GB DDR5 RAM, 1 TB SSD

MSI Katana A15 AI 15.6" Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen 7, RTX 4060 8gbVRAM, 16GB DDR5 RAM, 1 TB SSD

The LOQ Gaming is as expected significantly cheaper than the other 2 which would help but I don’t want to go cheap and it be useless in a couple of months. Ideally id get like 2-3 years out of it, I won’t be gaming on it purely just work in unreal (mainly) and potentially maya and photoshop.

Honestly any help would be greatly appreciated, and if you think its a dumb idea please also let me know

Thanks :smiley:

2

Hello, Welcome to the Forums.

My first thought is ‘Any laptop with a discrete GPU’ - But one thing to keep in mind with that is sometimes laptops will fall back on integrated graphics when not plugged in.

For my laptop I’m still using an Nvidia 1060 Max Q from 2019 (~1000$ new), seems to perform fine, but I don’t expect FPS above 30 when using lumen/high scalability settings. (1080p screen helps performance too) Personally for my next laptop I might even consider one with just integrated graphics with hopes of getting better battery life, portability, and not needing to lug around a power-brick style charging cord…

Out of those listed, system RAM would be my biggest concern. - I’ve been developing for UEFN lately, I currently have UEFN (1GB RAM) + Fortnite (5GB RAM) running + ~2GB of Google chrome tabs. All together (with other misc system stuff) I’m sitting at 25GB RAM usage. With fast storage maybe caching will kick in and it wont be a problem. So, the question I’d be asking myself is how many RAM slots those laptops have, and how are they populated. (slots with 2 8GB sticks vs 2 slots with 1 16GB stick)

Also look into connectivity - with Thunderbolt you could use an external GPU (I could imagine myself using an eGPU if I was going to be somewhere for a couple of hours)

Laptop end-game for me would be just remoting into my desktop at home. (Assuming there is very little input delay)