Looking to purchase a laptop but would appreciate some advice first.

[lewisinkster]

Hello,
I'm currently looking to purchase a new laptop. I study Computer Animation and Visual effects at university and I'm going into my final year come September. I have a tower PC which I have used for my studies up to this point but it's a mighty machine and not exactly something I can easily move around.

The PCs in the uni are not really up to the spec that the course so often demands and so I usually find myself wanting to work from my house, however as you can imagine this leads to questions over attendance and lack of tutor feedback which I would like to rid of especially with the being my graduation year. I also live a good distance away from home during the academic year (basically the length of Britain) so when I do go home I cannot do much work as I don't travel with my PC.

So I would like a laptop for mobility reasons, I accept that it's going to cost but it'll make life easier. I would like to use it for a good bulk of my work. I don't imagine I'll be rendering often on the machine but a laptop that will be able to handle programs such as Autodesk Maya, ZBrush and Houdini without problems is what I'm looking for. I know a decent amount about components etc and relatively what price range I'm looking at but would like some opinions or suggestions to steer me in the right direction.

I understand a good GPU and CPU are priorities and I have read about pro graphics cards such as Quadro cards from Nvidia but I'm not convinced the price tag warrants such an investment when a GTX 980M can be picked up a much cheaper price.

I don't want to spend in excess of £1500 as I'm a poor student. But around that price is okay.

I've been looking at (don't hate me, Dell offer student discount):
Alienware 15 r2 laptop (£1.730w/o discount)
- Intel i7-6820HK
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M
- 16GB DDR4 memory
- 256GB PCIe SSD
- 1TB HDD

MSI GT72 6QE-264UK Dominator Pro (£1.800)
- ""CPU
- ""GPU
- 32GB DDR4 memory
- "" SSD
- "" HDD
- BD Writer

to give you an idea of what I'm looking at, if it's overkill let me know- if it's not enough then I'm worried. Thanks in advance

-Lewis

 

[dark_lord69]

"I'm not convinced the price tag warrants such an investment when a GTX 980M can be picked up a much cheaper price."
I agree

"Alienware 15 r2 laptop"
The specs look good enough for what you want to do...

I do prefer MSI though, on the other hand it looks like the Alienware laptop will be cheaper.

If you're worried about the specs being good enough, you could wait a month or so and get a laptop with a GTX 1080M. (The next generation graphics card that is apparently faster than a desktop Titan X (900 series)).