best choice for laptop with 800$

[mohamad]

Hello there,

 

I want pay 800$ for laptop. you know I'm 3d artist so like it be useful for 3dsmax (don't need it be good for rendering), photoshop and for web programming (zend, apache, dreamweaver...).

 

size of monitor isn't so important and I like it be around 15". (I want it be small enough).

 

brand and operator (xp or vista...) is not important.

What's your suggest?

[STRAT]

i suggest you pop down to your local computer store and buy the best your $800 will get you.

[mohamad]

i suggest you pop down to your local computer store and buy the best your $800 will get you.

 

there are many stores with different options! so this is reason of my ask! for example one of those suggest me Dell 6400. it's good at all but VGA isn't powerfull (224mb).

 

I don't want pay more for laptop because I don't need it for more 3 hours in each day.

[STRAT]

i really cant see the problem. it's only $800, hardly expensive. just pop into your local store or stores, ask the salesmen for their recommendations given your criteria, then buy what they suggest. which ever way you look at it you wont get a massive choice for that amount, and they'll be at the lower end of the market anyway so dont worry about it.

 

Now if you have double or treble that amount to spend my advise would be considerably different.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

i know you are on a budget, but in all honesty, you need to consider doubling the amount you are willing to pay. $800 is going to get you a computer that lags, can't keep up, and is already out dated. you may not think it now, but you are not going to be happy with it, and you will be kicking yourself in the butt for not spending more upfront. the potential time savings of having a faster computer to complete standard tasks will eventually pay for itself. no need to go top of thee line here, but you need to at least upgrade to middle of the road.

[Brian Smith]

this might interest you. it's just a core 2 duo with 1 GB ram but for an extra $50 you can bump it up to 2GB, and with a little more 4GB. It's $899 but has a HD DVD player...so at the very least you can show clients your animations in high definition.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115412

[AJLynn]

I don't think an HD-DVD player would be useful for showing the client animations when that would require first burning the animations to HD-DVD, and the far simpler solution is to store the animation on the hard drive (since you've got your own computer with you anyway). Still, it's got a large hard drive and a real video card, but I wouldn't buy it because the CPU is slow by today's standards and it's ugly. I'd recommend this one instead - it costs more, but it's not unreasonable, and it's still only a WXGA screen but the 17" is better for having people standing around watching an animation or looking at an image on it.

[Brian Smith]

I don't think an HD-DVD player would be useful for showing the client animations when that would require first burning the animations to HD-DVD, and the far simpler solution is to store the animation on the hard drive (since you've got your own computer with you anyway). Still, it's got a large hard drive and a real video card, but I wouldn't buy it because the CPU is slow by today's standards and it's ugly. I'd recommend this one instead - it costs more, but it's not unreasonable, and it's still only a WXGA screen but the 17" is better for having people standing around watching an animation or looking at an image on it.

 

actually you dont need to burn to an hd dvd...you can burn to a standard disc and it will still work the same. there has been talk about this in another thread. even at 250 gb of hard drive, it wouldn't take long to run out of disc space to store the animations, but without an immense amount of ram im not sure you could play more than a few seconds if you played it off the hard drive

[AJLynn]

I regularly watch 720P videos on my Windows and Mac boxes with no problems. That's almost maxing out the screen resolution on that laptop.

[Brian Smith]

I regularly watch 720P videos on my Windows and Mac boxes with no problems. That's almost maxing out the screen resolution on that laptop.

 

cool....do you run it off ram..if so how much do you have?

[AJLynn]

It doesn't take all that much RAM. The CPU usage is worse. I've got 2GB on the Mac, which is what I'm on right now. The only HD video I have here to test is a 720p WMV file, and playing WMV on a Mac is a worst case scenario (WMPlayer is a PowerPC binary and it's crap so I've got a Quicktime plugin called Flip4Mac which is still not good but better than nothing). It plays smoothly using 70% of (one core of) a Core Duo 2.16 and 40MB of physical RAM (it allocated 1GB off the stack but all OSX programs do stuff like that - I've probably got 50GB of stack allocated right now).

[mohamad]

OK OK! I afraid! think it's better stay to calculate more money!

 

Also I don't said that I need it just for showing my works! (specialty I'm not animator, I'm 3d modeler and web programmer). So HD player (or some...) will not be useful for me.

 

Thanks for C&C.

[Hazdaz]

You guys are killing this poor guy... $800 is plenty for what he says he is going to use it for.

 

I just ordered a laptop this weekend.

Core 2 Duo, 2GBs RAM, 120GB HDD with a Geforce8400GS videocard. It's a refurbished unit from Dell, but was under $600.

 

As long as you realize that a laptop will always be slower than a desktop and you don't plan on doing too much rendering on the laptop itself, dropping $800 should get this guy a decent system.

 

Hell, just think back at what a top-of-the-line desktop you were using 2 or 3 years ago, and even today's mid-line laptops are probably faster.

 

I would like to point out though, that I would never want to have JUST a laptop... for me, my main (fastest) system will always be a desktop - the laptop is purely a secondary machine.

 

 

One last thing - keep away from integrated video cards. and I would keep away from any mobile AMD chips and don't even look at Celeron or Pentium chips. Simply put: Make sure it's a Core 2 Duo - they run cooler, run much faster and are relatively good with bettery life.

[IceAged]

You should be spending your money primarily on the processor, the graphics, and the RAM. Go for the cheapest Intel Core 2 Duo, GeForce Go graphics, and 2048 RAM, and you’ll have a good little setup.

From personal experience, I would recommend the Acer laptops – good quality, reasonable price, and reliable – you must have a laptop you can trust if you are presenting work to clients.