Laptop as sole computer

Jayst84

Jayst84

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G'day all,

Been pondering what to do when I finally get around to upgrading my computer. Currently using a late 2009 iMac 2.66 i5, Radeon HD 4850 and 16 GB of 1067 RAM. Took the spinning disk out last year and replaced with a Samsung EVO SSD which staved off the new computer for a while.

As Apple's gear gets more silly with every new release, I'm not too fussed either way about staying with them or shifting to MS.

I've been thinking if getting a specced out laptop is a feasible option. As I start doing more work on location, and could even potentially been in a studio some of the time in future - splitting post production time between home, studio, and location. Having some like a loaded up XPS15, and a decent monitor / docking station at each desk seems like it could make more sense than investing in a new desktop computer.

Does anybody use a laptop as their main / sole workstation? Work is 90% Lightroom, with a bit of Photoshop and the occasional foray into Premiere Pro and (very occasionally) Soundbooth.

Would I be right in thinking a good, new laptop is going to be a noticeable improvement over my ageing iMac?

Cheers for any thoughts.
 
iMacs were laptop spec hardware anyway, so you'll notice the improvement easily.
 
depends how much you want to spend but 16gb and an ssd in the imac shouldn't exactly be a slouch. okay its probably a dual core i5 which may hold it back a bit.

personally I wouldn't use a laptop as a main machine, only if it was pokey as hell and was hooked up to at least a 27" 2560x1440 IPS.
 
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A 17" Asus gaming laptop (with external monitor, keyboard & tablet) works just fine for me. I don't have a docking station and it's a minor pfaff to set everything up and put away but not serious.

It's a while since I bought mine but Asus were one of the few to make laptops with non-glossy screens which cover >95% of sRGB; it's not an IPS panel though.
 
Thanks for the thoughts guys.

frod said:
iMacs were laptop spec hardware anyway, so you'll notice the improvement easily.
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Yeah, I get that. Could thermal throttling be more of an issue in a laptop though?

neil_g said:
depends how much you want to spend but 16gb and an ssd in the imac shouldn't exactly be a slouch. okay its probably a dual core i5 which may hold it back a bit.

personally I wouldn't use a laptop as a main machine, only if it was pokey as hell and was hooked up to at least a 27" 2560x1440 IPS.
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From a cursory look during last night's job, Lightroom doesn't seem to use much RAM, it's the CPU that's maxed out all the time. (And that's possibly a good enough reason to go with a desktop over a laptop. Either way it will be getting hooked up to a decent monitor.

juggler said:
A 17" Asus gaming laptop (with external monitor, keyboard & tablet) works just fine for me. I don't have a docking station and it's a minor pfaff to set everything up and put away but not serious.

It's a while since I bought mine but Asus were one of the few to make laptops with non-glossy screens which cover >95% of sRGB; it's not an IPS panel though.
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Are you doing many high volume jobs? I'm guessing any decent laptop will be fine for portrait work (for example), but regularly pushing a few thousand files through Lightroom is where I'm wondering if it will start to slow down...
 
This is something I've considered doing, and may still do one day. There are some laptops that are certainly powerful enough (not sure about macbooks but suspect the latest may well be). We have a variety of laptops at work, and it is all I use for my job which isn't photography related. I recently tested one of the later Dell Precision laptops, without a shadow of a doubt this would easily meet your needs, but they are eye wateringly expensive. The Dell XPS range are also worth a look, some have excellent monitors too.

With a docking station and monitor(s), it would make a great system imo.
 
My only personal machine is a i7 16gb 13" MacBook, I used to have a i7 windows machine with a pair of 19" screens. My other half has successfully annexed the office to compete her PhD, I don't find only having a laptop particularly restrictive and have processed my way through ~20k images in the last 2 years. I am lucky that I have access to a couple of big workstations in work, but I can honestly say I don't use these for anything but work and the laptop has been fine for all my image processing requirements and a little lightweight video editing.
 
I've been a programmer on a variety of embedded, gaming, and video codec research projects, and the last desktop I had was an Acorn Archimedes A310. ^_^ I did feel the need for more RAM on one project, but that was sometimes unavoidably very memory hungry, to the point where one bug pointed out that OS X's swap space limit at the time was apparently 64GB.

So, yes, it can be done, very comfortably. Of course, not all laptops are created equal - some displays are better than others (LCD color gamut, backlight brightness and whiteness), some SSDs are faster than others, some systems can withstand full load more easily, and so on, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that easy to push the limits of anything reasonably well specced these days.
 
Jayst84 said:
Thanks for the thoughts guys.
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Are you doing many high volume jobs? I'm guessing any decent laptop will be fine for portrait work (for example), but regularly pushing a few thousand files through Lightroom is where I'm wondering if it will start to slow down...[/QUOTE]

I don't really do high volume stuff. The most I import at once is 600 raw images, and I tend to use perfect browse to cull, rate and flag first as it's way faster than Lightroom. Some of my catalogues have many thousands of images though.

I sometimes use a lot of layers in photoshop - maybe 20 - and don't notice any adverse effects other than gobbling up disk space.

I've got both an SSD and a conventional HDD in mine and swap between them according to need.
 
juggler said:
I don't really do high volume stuff. The most I import at once is 600 raw images, and I tend to use perfect browse to cull, rate and flag first as it's way faster than Lightroom. Some of my catalogues have many thousands of images though.

I sometimes use a lot of layers in photoshop - maybe 20 - and don't notice any adverse effects other than gobbling up disk space.
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Cool, thanks mate.

Think I went through about 8-9k in the last couple of weeks. Doing another 600-1200 per day for 6 days this week. Same day/next morning turnaround on most of it as well.
 
neil_g said:
Well a laptop will be nowhere near as ventilated as a desktop. Themal throttling especially on the lower power laptop cpu chips could be an issue.
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That's what I thought.

A quick look at the XPS 15 CPU its base clockspeed is practically the same as the one in my iMac (2.8 vs 2.67). It scores a bucket load higher in most tests though, down to turbo boosting and new fangled wizardry I'm sure.
 
just a well built desktop can be ventilated well and with a fan controller can be very quiet when needed.

for the record I've had some good laptops, latitudes of various revisions and most lately precision m6600 and m3800. they were good but again i maintain i would not want to do any heavy workloads, especially video editing (have you checked the GPU acceleration compatibility list for Premiere Pro?). even my aging desktop 2nd gen i7 wins in that regard.
 
neil_g said:
just a well built desktop can be ventilated well and with a fan controller can be very quiet when needed.

for the record I've had some good laptops, latitudes of various revisions and most lately precision m6600 and m3800. they were good but again i maintain i would not want to do any heavy workloads, especially video editing (have you checked the GPU acceleration compatibility list for Premiere Pro?). even my aging desktop 2nd gen i7 wins in that regard.
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Yeah, my current iMac may as well not have a video card. Premiere can be painful at times, but I'm not doing heaps of time critical video work (not at the moment anyway). I'm sure the 1050 in the new XPS (or 1060 in Razers and the like) would murder it.
 
neil_g said:
Well a laptop will be nowhere near as ventilated as a desktop. Themal throttling especially on the lower power laptop cpu chips could be an issue.
Click to expand...
it will be no different than an iMac, there is nothing about the iMac design that is more temperature efficient than an open laptop. Of course a desktop with 12" fans is going to run cooler. But thermal throttling only kicks in at 90C. You're not going to hit that, certainly not in photoshop.
 
Mmm, thanks for the thoughts everyone. Still very tempted to go for a tricked out Windows laptop. But it just occurred to me last night, my other Adobe software besides LR and PS which are on CC licensing, are Mac OS versions on CD. I don't use Premiere, Soundbooth, After Effects (everything from the CS5 Master Collection) often enough to justify a new licence, but I would certainly miss them. Pain in the arse.
 
Jayst84 said:
Mmm, thanks for the thoughts everyone. Still very tempted to go for a tricked out Windows laptop. But it just occurred to me last night, my other Adobe software besides LR and PS which are on CC licensing, are Mac OS versions on CD. I don't use Premiere, Soundbooth, After Effects (everything from the CS5 Master Collection) often enough to justify a new licence, but I would certainly miss them. Pain in the arse.
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I'm fairly sure that Adobe will transfer the licence for you, maybe worth logging a support ticket with them.
 
I use an XPS15 9530 as my photo workstation, generally plugged into a monitor, but also on the built in screen. If it's loaded then the fans spin up but it seems to cope OK, though my workload is smaller - importing 200-300 images at a time and exporting typically 5-50. Building image previews on import can work it fairly hard.

Jayst84 said:
OK, last thing (for now). All my backups are formatted as Mac OS Journaled I believe. To keep using these properly if I switched to Windows, would it be a case of formatting a second disk to exfat, copying the whole lot over, then repeating with all my external drives?
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Yes, IIRC. I'll try to check later (on my linux box right now, but still have a Mac formatted drive).
 
frod said:
it will be no different than an iMac, there is nothing about the iMac design that is more temperature efficient than an open laptop. Of course a desktop with 12" fans is going to run cooler. But thermal throttling only kicks in at 90C. You're not going to hit that, certainly not in photoshop.
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I'm not saying an imac is well ventilated, it's just a glorified laptop after all.

Laptop cpu have a lower throttle threshold iirc*. But photoshop depending on the processing you're applying is certainly capable of using large chunks of cpu so the potential is there for hot operation.

*edit - on paper the values are pretty high but in practice can be much lower. look at the surface issue where they were experiencing throttling as low as 80c.
 
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@Jayst84 I have the same iMac, did the same upgrade last year and same trouble now. One thought for Lightroom - did you check your preferences? I think there is one, could be GPU acceleration, that when I switched it off has speeded things up.
 
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