Best/Recommended laptop for maya, 3ds max, vray after effects (rendering/animation)

The only question I would really have would be how strong is the GPU going to play into things with those applications. I would say that for a processor you probably aren't going to get much better in terms of performance there. 16 GB of ram is pretty good as well, along side a SSD will not hurt. I know that After effects works just fine with a windows machine using it myself. I download templates here and there and try them out videohive.net has some pretty nifty templates that people have made and sell. The two 3d rendering programs maya and 3ds I'm not sure about have you done research to see what power it takes to drive good renders with those applications. Your computer specs are great its just that the GPU isn't a workstation card you know a AMD Firepro or a Nvidia Quadro so it's hard for me to say without doing some google researching whether or not the 860M with Cuda would be sufficient.

"At your price point I would focus on RAM and the storage system. I would stay with 8GB of RAM and an SSD or some kind of caching SSD + HDD.



SLI is useless for viewport acceleration so it's not a deciding factor. As for the GPU I would stick with Nvidia to be able to take advantage of some of the Nvidia only features (iray for example). You don't "technically" need a Quadro card. Our software is certified to run on them and it's only with them that you would receive support from us but between you, me, and the wall my personal laptop runs a Nvidia Geforce 660m gpu and I'm a happy camper.



After that the last deciding factor would be the CPU. Basically go for the fastest you can get but keep in mind that there are options when it comes to rendering long projects. So don't compromise on the other components just to get a slightly faster CPU. You can always do the following:



-Just dump the job onto another, faster computer, once your done.

-Setup a render farm if you have extra computers lying around doing nothing.



I guess what I'm trying to say is that you have some options if your system is a little on the slow side when it comes to rendering. Not having enough RAM though is a problem because that can prevent you from even opening heavy scenes. Also having a slow hard drive can make things like starting Max and opening scenes a hair pulling experience.



Anyways, my 2 cents worth. Hope this clears the air a little.


Ben Bisares
"





http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/installation-hardware-os/laptop-for-3d-max/td-p/4543695

The way I understand it is that Quadro or Firepro's are validated to do certain tasks within professional applications. Where as cuda and opencl will work in some but maybe not all tasks. I'd feel comfortable with the laptop you have there. Your rendering time's may not set the world on fire but I would say they would be fast enough. The i7 based on the support persons response leads me to believe its more important along with the ram.

I would be happy with a laptop from MSI I think they make good things. I would also say ASUS and Lenavo are good to. From a gaming/productivity standpoint of course.