Solved! Is there a laptop or what is the best and most efficient laptop for 3D with low power consumption and as eco as possible.

[Animat]

Hi,

I am a 3D artist… and lately I have been asking myself the same question over and over again, because it is time to upgrade my old working laptop which is power hungry as hell and I would like to minimize on this aspect and to use a laptop that can be more eco-friendly and less power hungry to do my 3D animation work.

But I know… it really doesn’t make sense because anything that requires high-end graphics like 3D, be animation or modelling, etc. it requires higher power which translate at the end of the day to hungry power usage.

I know there might be really no way around this, but just dropping the question out here.

Is there a laptop or what is the best and most efficient laptop for 3D with low power consumption and as eco as possible.

Hopefully, some of you might have some ideas.

Thank you beforehand

 

[hang-the-9]

You can have power efficient or fast processing speed, but you can't have both at a high scale. Once you start to go towards less power draw you need to start taking away from something else, if you want speed, you need to add power draw. No way around it under the current technology.

You did not really give a lot of details though, what exact laptop do you have? Without knowing what you have now there is no way to know what would be better. How much is less power use vs speed matters to you, do you just want a balanced system with good enough speed and good enough power use? What are the specs your programs need to run well or to run well enough that you are not annoyed at using them? Sure you can get a laptop for "3D" that uses low power, if you are OK with it running slower or waiting longer for things to render, but I am guessing you don't want to cut the speed in half to save on power.

 

[Animat]

Thank Hang the 9,

I know 3D animation is very demanding on GPU and certainly less power will make the computer slower, I am not a tech-savvy, and usually I get lost when people start talking about GPU or CPU and Razen, etc. So I am learning on all these aspects on the go.

My last laptop was an Alienware 17 R2 (Early 2015), running on Windows 10, 16RAM, Processor Intel(R) Core i7, but I cannot remember the rest and I don't have the info with me either as I cannot get into the machine. It has been working great for the work I do 3d animation and concept arts… but unfortunately, I fried the machine, well it stop work after 5 years the technician told me that have two short circuits on the motherboard but also have affected the graphics card, so he told me replace the machine or replace the motherboard, which is costly.

I really don't want to get another costly alienware if the result might be the same after 4 or 5 years... it isn't worth it, the investment.

To do my work I use Autodesk Maya, PS, unity... etc.

 

[hang-the-9]

Most laptops would be less power hungry than the Alienrware you have. If you want good speeds for your programs, there no no way around getting one with a good CPU and video card for hardware rendering and that means more power use. If you are OK with good enough speeds then something with a Ryzen 7 CPU will be good and will run on less power than a full on gaming or workstation system.

5 years for a laptop lifespan is actually not too bad, especially for a higher end one that generates a lot of heat and is used at full speeds.

 

[Animat]

Thank you hang-the-9.

Yes, certainly... as I used Autodesk MAYA for animation...

I have been looking in two laptops, one is the gaming.

OMEN 15-en1003ns Gaming Laptop with NVIDIA® GeForce RTX ™ 3070 Graphics

Windows 10 Home 64

AMD Ryzen ™ 7 5800H (up to 4.4 GHz maximum clock boost, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores, 16 threads)

RAM DDR4-3200 MHz 16 GB (2 x 8 GB)

1 TB M.2 PCIe® NVMe ™ TLC SSD

15.6 "(39.6 cm) diagonal FHD, 144 Hz, 7 ms response time, IPS, micro-edge bezel, anti-glare, 300 nits, 72% NTSC (1920 x 1080)

NVIDIA® GeForce RTX ™ 3070 Notebook GPU (8 GB GDDR6 Dedicated)

And the other is the HP ZBook Power G7 Mobile Workstation

Windows 10 Pro 64

Intel® Core ™ i7-10750H (2.6 GHz base frequency, up to 5.0 GHz with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology, 12 MB L3 cache, 6 cores)

RAM DDR4-3200 MHz 8 GB (1 x 8 GB)

256 GB PCIe® SSD

15.6 "(39.6 cm) diagonal FHD, IPS, anti-glare, 250 nits, 45% NTSC (1920 x 1080)

NVIDIA® Quadro® P620 (4 GB GDDR5 dedicated)

I know this might not make much of a sense... but... I like both machine, but there are few things that I am trying to avoid at this moment, my old computer had the following and that is the stuff I will try to avoided in the new machine.

- I will try to avoid a machine that is constantly on a full blast fan noise.

- I also will try to avoid intensive heat as much as I can (I know this can deteriorate the life of the machine)

- Power consumption is another thing, I can see that the Omen takes about 200W and the HP ZBook Power G7 takes about 150W AC is which lower but of course this could lower the performance is someway I am guessing. But as you mention " Ryzen 7 CPU will be good and will run on less power than a full on gaming or workstation system."

My head is heading to get the HP ZBook Power G7, because the reviews that I have read most then are saying that it is a quiet but powerful machine, it has an NVIDIA® Quadro® P620, but I know NVIDIA Quadro’s are getting out the door and the model with this machine is a basic one, but still an NVIDIA® Quadro® P620. I will upgrade the RAM to 32 GB if I finally choose this unit, I also like the aspect that not many people had reported many problems with the machine, and it seems a well put machine.

The thing that I am not really clear about is the Intel® Core ™ i7-10750H (2.6 GHz base frequency, up to 5.0 GHz with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology, 12 MB L3 cache, 6 cores) as the work I do is 3D animation, that means PCU will be important. The Omen has an AMD Ryzen ™ 7 5800H (up to 4.4 GHz maximum clock boost, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores, 16 threads) which it seems better than the Intel Core i7-10750H, but I could be quite wrong on this.

So is the Intel® Core ™ i7-10750H good for 3D animation with Autodesk MAYA or will be better the AMD Ryzen ™ 7 5800H?

What will be your thoughts on this?

 

[hang-the-9]

Don't know which CPU works best with Maya but there should be benchmarks out there to look at. If not, then just look at the general CPU benchmarks. Just looking at the power usage does not always mean the system will have more or less performance since the CPU, chipset, video card are would be running on different technologies.