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by merlinator on Tue Dec 27, 2022 7:23 pm
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I am looking at getting a new laptop.  E. J. recommends Razer.  I will be using this while travelling and doing some lightroom and photoshop work.  Should I get an i9 or 12 generation i7 or is AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX good enough? What video card is recommended, integrated or not?  16 or 32 Ram?  At this present time money is not a problem,  I want to get the best I can, at my age this may be the last laptop I ever get.
Roy
 

by E.J. Peiker on Wed Dec 28, 2022 3:51 pm
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I'd stay away from i9 in a laptop personally - they give off a lot of heat and often thermally throttle although Razer uses active fans so the throttling isn't so much an issue as the fact that the computer might get too hot to comfortably have on your lap.. Gen 12 i7 is the way to go with 32GB and the RTX 3080 graphics card. Integrated graphics are definitely not good enough for a serious imaging computer.
 

by merlinator on Thu Dec 29, 2022 7:03 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:I'd stay away from i9 in a laptop personally - they give off a lot of heat and often thermally throttle although Razer uses active fans so the throttling isn't so much an issue as the fact that the computer might get too hot to comfortably have on your lap..  Gen 12 i7 is the way to go with 32GB and the RTX 3080 graphics card.  Integrated graphics are definitely not good enough for a serious imaging computer.

Thanks E.J.  I was hoping you would chime in.  What screen is best and any benefit in going for the RTX 3080i?
Roy
 

by E.J. Peiker on Fri Dec 30, 2022 10:44 am
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I personally like the 2560x1440 because some of the stuff I use doesn't scale font size to resolution resulting in fonts that are too small. But if all of your apps scale then the 4K displays are a great option. The benefit of the separate graphics processor instead of the integrated one is multiple - it's MUCH faster and doesn't bog down your CPU with graphics tasks and also has it's own memory so that graphics tasks don't have to borrow memory from your system memory. You still get the integrated graphics too as it's part of the CPU and you can set-up, in the nVidia program that comes with the laptop, which applications use the 3080 card. So you specify any and all of your photo apps to use that but not other things like your internet browser, email program etc. Using the 3080 impacts battery life a lot so you only want to use it on apps that can actually benefit from it.

To give you an idea of how much a graphics processor can help - I did a focus stack of 10 100 megapixel images processed in Helicon Focus. Without the GPU it took 1 minute and 49 seconds to complete. With a 3080 it took 2.8 seconds. Basically anything that requires a lot of graphics rendering will be dramatically faster.
 

by merlinator on Wed Jan 04, 2023 7:34 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote: I personally like the 2560x1440 because some of the stuff I use doesn't scale font size to resolution resulting in fonts that are too small.  But if all of your apps scale then the 4K displays are a great option.  The benefit of the separate graphics processor instead of the integrated one is multiple - it's MUCH faster and doesn't bog down your CPU with graphics tasks and also has it's own memory so that graphics tasks don't have to borrow memory from your system memory.  You still get the integrated graphics too as it's part of the CPU and you can set-up, in the nVidia program that comes with the laptop, which applications use the 3080 card.  So you specify any and all of your photo apps to use that but not other things like your internet browser, email program etc.  Using the 3080 impacts battery life a lot so you only want to use it on apps that can actually benefit from it.

To give you an idea of how much a graphics processor can help - I did a focus stack of 10 100 megapixel images processed in Helicon Focus.  Without the GPU it took 1 minute and 49 seconds to complete.  With a 3080 it took 2.8 seconds.  Basically anything that requires a lot of graphics rendering will be dramatically faster.
Thanks E.J.  I put my order in 
Roy
 

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