Laptop Buying Advice Needed For Photoshop/Blender

Any specific reason you are looking at a laptop? a 17" laptop is a desktop replacement with all the compromises of a laptop (inadequate cooling, fan noise, crap battery life, extremely limited expansion options, landfill once it dies), you get better bang for your buck with a desktop (or SFF/ITX build, like an NUC-type machine)

Without knowing anything else about this unit, old gen chip and GPU don't feel worthy of the price point.

I'm assuming you are buying used / refurb since those are dated parts. If that's the case, it is not a good deal.

Other than the 4K screen, you can likely get a 17" inch refurb with an 11th gen i7 / 5000 ryzen with a 3060 from official laptop refurb channel.

For example, there is an 17" acer refurb with Intel I7-11800H/16Gb RAM/512Gb SSD/RTX3060 for $1550 from acer refurb.

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/ac ... y/15937758

If you are lucky, for 1615 you can get an openbox Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Notebook - 17.3" QHD AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, RTX 3070, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD (hopefully CC openbox is not as bad as neweggs lol)

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product ... _id=201577

So I think if you spend a little bit of time hunting, for 1500 you can aim for 4K and 3060.

Real_GM wrote: ↑ I'm assuming you are buying used / refurb since those are dated parts. If that's the case, it is not a good deal.

Other than the 4K screen, you can likely get a 17" inch refurb with an 11th gen i7 / 5000 ryzen with a 3060 from official laptop refurb channel.

For example, there is an 17" acer refurb with Intel I7-11800H/16Gb RAM/512Gb SSD/RTX3060 for $1550 from acer refurb.

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/ac ... y/15937758

If you are lucky, for 1615 you can get an openbox Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Notebook - 17.3" QHD AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, RTX 3070, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD (hopefully CC openbox is not as bad as neweggs lol)

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product ... _id=201577

So I think if you spend a little bit of time hunting, for 1500 you can aim for 4K and 3060.

Thanks for the heads up! The laptop is brand new and has a heavy discount so just wanted to make sure - here's the link - Link

Personally from a creator perspective, I would get a 15" with thunderbolt and at least a 3050. Something like this if $1400 is your budget
https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00120555
Nitro 5 AN515-57-79YR w/ Core™ i7-11800H, 16GB, 512GB SSD, 15.6in Full HD, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, Wi-Fi 6, BT, Windows 11 Home
or
GS66 STEALTH 10SE-688CA w/ Core™ i7-10750H, 16GB, 1TB NVMe SSD, 15.6in Full HD 240Hz, GeForce RTX 2060, Windows 10 Home
https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00120637

3050 Ti while slower than 1660 Ti in gaming, it is actually 20 to 30% faster in rendering due to next generation cuda core and likely tensor core. You can also get better performance with DLSS

You want a thunderbolt because you can dock it at home at your desk.

It is unlikely you would do serious artistic work on your bed/couch, so having thunderbolt enables you to easily connect to a eGPU, monitors and whatever artistic peripheral you use.

I'm assuming You are looking at laptops with 17" 4K screens because you want to work else where, show your client your work and/or going to classes. But in reality, clients only wants to see the gist of it and you don't need to be super Hi-Res. If you want to work away from home, most often the work is in draft and you would likely finesse it at home. So 1080p 15" screen is probably enough and it is much easier to carry around. You can buy or rent a spyder/xrite to calibrate your screen yourself.

Don't get too stuck on wanting a single device setup with the largest screen. Once you start working on a laptop, even if it is a 17" screen, you would realize you want a bigger or dual screen attach to it. 2" different on a laptop is negligible since you are still going to plant your face close to the screen.

My recommend is get a 15" laptop with thunderbolt and discrete graphics around $1200-1300. Assess your setup up after using it and plan to get a monitor/thunderbolt dock.