Best Laptop for Lightroom (Speed in Develop)

[smny00]

Hello,

I am a laptop user - haven't owned a desktop for decades now.

My last four or five systems have been Thinkpad workstation class laptops.

My current system is two years old:

Thinkpad W541
Intel I7-4810M 2.8GHz
32GB RAM
Two SSD drives (no RAID)
Quadro K2100M
3K Screen

Lightroom has been super slow for me since I started working with 50MB RAW files from my Canon 5DSRs. Just editing files in Lightroom in develop mode. Every change takes too long. But I'm going through 1,000 to a few thousand images per job.

Lenovo has some new Thinkpads out - the P51 and P71 (15" and 17"). I'm wondering what kind of performance benefit I'd get out of upgrading. I'd prefer the smaller P51 - the biggest difference seems to be the graphic cards... Both run Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 Processor (8MB Cache, up to 4.0GHz).

P51 has the NVIDIA Quadro M2200 4GB GDDR5, and I could double my RAM to 64GB and I was thinking I could run RAID 0 on two SSDs.

P71 you can get NVIDIA Quadro P3000 6GB, P4000 8GB or P5000 16GB. Doesn't seem like Lightroom is the best at taking advantage of better graphics cards though.

Or is there another laptop that might be better? I'm pretty married to the Thinkpad keyboard and pointing stick though, so it would have to be a lot better. I would get a 4K screen on either.

Thanks for any thoughts...

 

[hang-the-9]

In two years there has not been that much of a difference in CPUs, and RAID 0 in SSDs will not help you much at all, for sure not worth the data loss risk or having to re-build the system. The workstation Lenovo models are as good as any, all the brands will have the same specs in that range, and Lenovo is no less of a good build than the other workstation systems. You may want to look at some benchmarks with the program you use for different CPUs and see if the change in computers is worth it now.