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New Laptop Recommendation

Mike Page

I know these questions are annoying and come up again and again, so apologies in advance. I've got about €2.5 k to blow on a new laptop (Christmas bonus - about $2750 or UK 2150). My present machine (3 year old i7-6700HQ, 8 GB ram, Nvidia GTX 960M 2 GB, 17" display) can be a little temperamental running ON1 - both 2019 and 2020. Unfortunately I have keyboard damage and it can't be replaced, otherwise I'd just look at upgrading the ram, but with news of the bonus I've got GAS! 

I'm tending towards a Dell G Series 17" machine, but if anyone has any clear recommendations based on concrete experience, I'd be grateful.

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Comments

6 comments

Date Votes
  • Andre Moreau

    Mike,

    Your present system is not too shabby Mike. Its CPU has a benchmark score of 8127 which would have been near top of the class when you bought it. To double its computing power would take an i9 CPU. Also look to get more than 8GB of RAM.

    CPU Benchmark: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

    GPU benchmark:  https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

     

     

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    Getting a larger video card will also help improve your system's performance.

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  • Mike Page

    OK, thanks people. Normally I would think seriously about upgrading the present system rather than replacing it. Unfortunately the keyboard is faulty and irreplaceable, so I'm looking at a complete overhaul, but your comments are very useful for determining the new specs. 

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    I also recommend getting an SSD dedicated to ON1's PerfectBrowseCache & Scratch space. Moving the Scratch space to a separate drive will improve the program's performance noticeably. Make sure it has its own direct connection and is not daisy chained to another drive or connected through a hub (either internal or external). That will minimize any I/O contention when multiple drives are being accessed simultaneously.

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  • Petr König

    Hi Brian,

    I have ASUS G752VY with 16 GB RAM, I7-6700HQ, GTX 960M 4 GB, 2TB HDD and 256 GB SSD NMVe PCiE for Windows and all applications including On1.

    I moved PerfectBrowseCache & Scratch space to 2 TB HDD (plenty of space) and my photos are also on this HDD.

    I was now considering getting another internal SSD NMVe (there is one more unoccupied slot) to improve speed of editing, exporting and preview generation. To make a comparison I moved PerfectBrowseCache & Scratch space + some folders with photos to SSD to see if there is any difference in responsiveness. 

    I can hardly see any improvement. I also checked speed of reading/writing on SSD during editing and generation of previews and both speeds hardly ever go above 100 MB/s. Which is quicte low for SSD and my HDD can do the same. I also run a benchmark test for my laptop and SSD shows there some 1,8 GB/s for reading and 1 GB for writing.

    So it seems that ON1 does not actually utilize the speed of SSD that would justify buying extra SSD compared to current status with using HDD to do all the job.

    Therefore I would like to ask you Brian, how did you notice the difference of performance with SSD which you describe here. Maybe I need to do something more but do not know what it is :-)

    RAM is usually around 10 GB with ON1 + Chrome opened at the same time. CPU is usually at 20% but during export and preview generation it may reach 80 %. GPU is usually below 20 %.

    Thank you for your comment.

    Petr

     

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    I haven't done any specific measuring, I just noticed that after adding an external SSD to my laptop the program performed better. It was quite noticeable in my case.

    One difference between us is that I do not have my photos on the scratch SSD. That drive does not contain any user data at all, only scratch space for ON1 and Ps 6 and the PerfectBrowseCache for ON1. Having both photos you are working on and the program's scratch space sharing the same drive means the I/O is also shared which can lead to I/O contention and performance degradation.

    My photos have always been on a separate drive from when I first started using Ps on a desktop system. It has made upgrading computer systems so much easier as the photos do not have to be migrated from system to system, I just move the drive to the new computer and I'm in business.

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