Workstation or Gaming laptop for doing Video, Photo, and 3D work

Blarg King

Estimable
Mar 11, 2014
4
0
4,510
So like the title says, I'm looking to get a new laptop, mainly for doing video editing in Premier, photo editing in Photoshop, and 3D modeling/animation in Maya and Mudbox.

These are the two laptops I'm looking at:

Dell Precision M3800

MSI GS70

Both offer lots of ram, good CPU, and SSD storage options. My main concern is the dedicated graphics.

The Dell has a Quadro K1100M workstation GPU, which would seem the obvious choice for the work I'm doing, except it only has 2GB of VRAM, which is why I'm considering the MSI, because even though it has a gaming card, it has a much larger 6GB of VRAM.

So which would be better? A GPU thats dedicated to the tasks I'm doing, or a GPU that won't work as well for the tasks I'm doing, but has more memory for textures and stuff?

Thanks!
 

Xproyect

Estimable
Jul 10, 2014
4
0
4,510


Bigger HDD, more RAM (depending on the M3800 you get), and better processor
 

Blarg King

Estimable
Mar 11, 2014
4
0
4,510
Thats not my main concern. My concern is about the graphics card. The other specs are more flexible.

Here, I'll do a comparison with how I would configure the Dell

Dell CPU: Core i7 Quad Core 2.3 Ghz MSI CPU: Core i7 Quad Core 2.5 Ghz

200 Mhz isn't a significant difference

Dell Storage: 256GB SSD MSI Storage: 256GB SSD + 1 TB HDD

Again, either works fine. I don't necessarily need a 1TB HDD

Dell RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 MSI RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600

Identical ram config.

Now, my main point of issue is the graphics.

The Dell has a more optimized graphics card for what I need, while the MSI has more VRAM. I can't decide if I'll be better off with a faster GPU or having a larger memory to store models and textures and for buffering.

EDIT: I should also note, I've chosen between just these two laptops because they are both powerful and thin and light. Being thin and light is important to me because I have to travel a lot with this thing, and my current 8 pound laptop is too cumbersome.