What laptop requirements are needed for dual monitors

GO photography

Distinguished
Dec 3, 2011
3
0
18,510
I am buying a new laptop and need to know the requirements to run dual monitors. I run Photoshop and lightroom on desktop and laptop and keep my files and catalog (lightroom) on external drives. Any thoughts on what I should be looking for?
 
Solution

perfectblue

Distinguished
Oct 25, 2011
113
0
18,660
You can run dual monitor on 'almost' any laptop. Most of them have two ports nowadays, VGA/DVI + S-VIDEO/HDMI. Just make sure that the monitors you get have support the connection.

The performance (gaming/work) on dual monitor of course depends on how good is your the graphic card.
 

GO photography

Distinguished
Dec 3, 2011
3
0
18,510


Thanks for your responce. I am looking at two laptops, both Asus. They are between $900 and 1000 on newegg. Both have HDMI ports, Nvidia Geforce GT 540M graphics cards and 1gb of dedicated vidio memory, and 1920x1080 resolution. The laptops have two diferences; one has i7 and 750 HD at 7200rpms and the other i5 and 640gb at 5400rpms. As a photographer, I am looking to use the laptop to drive a 22in monitor when I am at home. I will be using the laptop almost excusivly for photoshop, plugins and Lightroom. I do slide shows and send pics to clients. I just did not know if the grafics card or the other features of these two computers were adequate to drive the full features, including the resolution, of the second, but larger, monitor. Any thoughts?
 

perfectblue

Distinguished
Oct 25, 2011
113
0
18,660



Theoretically even if your i7/i5 laptop do not have a discrete graphic card it should be able to display up to 2560 x 1600 resolution via display port. Whatever the size of the monitor, the resolution is what determines whether you can display from you computer or not. So graphics card is not a issue for displaying in monitor.

Since you wont be using games such such, you wont need high performance cards. But for Photoshop where you will load up a lot of images, its better to have a decent discrete card and as fast and much RAM as possible. You could get 1333Mhz 4-8GB or more.

i7 has hyper threading which is can be used in Photoshop CS5 to improve performance. But the gain is almost negligible. On the other had, if you had a i7 with faster RAM (speed and timing) which you have to separately buy and install, then you could see visible improvement over the i5.

Hope the questions are clarified. Choose wisely. Good luck!
 
Solution