I'll be moving to Canada for College later this year and I was looking for the right laptop for the Graphic Design course. Since I'm more of a desktop guy, I didn't know much about what the market had to offer. After browsing quite a bit, reading reviews, etc etc, I came up with absolutely nothing positive.
First thing you might say is, go get yourself a retina macbook pro. Well... that's a big no for various reasons. I've owned til now about 4 macbook pros, being the later the first retina released. All of then gave me headaches. Tons of retina models suffer from image retention and/or yellow tint on screen, which is unacceptable for a desiner. I changed twice the screen of my later retina macbook pro and yet the screen was still a bit yellow. After some calibrations, the yellow vanished but it wasn't as good as a factor calibrated screen (I'm no expert in the area, just got a calibrated set up from another guy).
In short, the laptop must be:
- 15" preferably
- i7 haswell cpu
- Slim and light (no more than 2.4kg). Forget about those bulky asus, alienware and whatnot
- Good build, such as nice trackpack, "ok" stereo speakers, keyboard that doesn't flex, good mic
- 1080p IPS screen (due to terrible windows scaling UI, I want to use the laptop in it's native res,
so 3k or 4k screens are out of question, everything would be too small on native res)
- Dedicated video card, preferably 860m or better
- Decent ventilation (I know I want it slim, and these two things can't coexist, but I don't want
to see it throttling all the time)
- 8gb ram +
Everytime I got close to get the right specs and all, some deal breaker component would back me out again, such as it happened on the razer blade pro 2014 and msi gs60 ghost pro (even without using trackpad people complain of the mouse cursor jumping and clicking on screen just by resting their hands on the laptop, and keyboard was flexible in the center). I'm really out of ideas. There seems to be nothing really decent without deal breaker flaws.
Any suggestion on the right laptop would be much appreciated.
First thing you might say is, go get yourself a retina macbook pro. Well... that's a big no for various reasons. I've owned til now about 4 macbook pros, being the later the first retina released. All of then gave me headaches. Tons of retina models suffer from image retention and/or yellow tint on screen, which is unacceptable for a desiner. I changed twice the screen of my later retina macbook pro and yet the screen was still a bit yellow. After some calibrations, the yellow vanished but it wasn't as good as a factor calibrated screen (I'm no expert in the area, just got a calibrated set up from another guy).
In short, the laptop must be:
- 15" preferably
- i7 haswell cpu
- Slim and light (no more than 2.4kg). Forget about those bulky asus, alienware and whatnot
- Good build, such as nice trackpack, "ok" stereo speakers, keyboard that doesn't flex, good mic
- 1080p IPS screen (due to terrible windows scaling UI, I want to use the laptop in it's native res,
so 3k or 4k screens are out of question, everything would be too small on native res)
- Dedicated video card, preferably 860m or better
- Decent ventilation (I know I want it slim, and these two things can't coexist, but I don't want
to see it throttling all the time)
- 8gb ram +
Everytime I got close to get the right specs and all, some deal breaker component would back me out again, such as it happened on the razer blade pro 2014 and msi gs60 ghost pro (even without using trackpad people complain of the mouse cursor jumping and clicking on screen just by resting their hands on the laptop, and keyboard was flexible in the center). I'm really out of ideas. There seems to be nothing really decent without deal breaker flaws.
Any suggestion on the right laptop would be much appreciated.