New Laptop advice request

norjens said:

I will also add that 16 GB of RAM is the new minimum. Windows + Browser easily eat up 7+ these days, your existing 8 GB is very likely the main cause of lag when photo editing. When you run out the computer starts writing the overflow onto disk which is sloooooooow. You want 16GB minimum, 32 if you want to do a lot of batch edit operations on RAW files.

Click to expand...

Thank you norjens, This point is especially enlightening for me.

I just had a look - and indeed, Capture One idling and this web browser open has my memory usage sitting on 93% ! I understand about writing the overflow to disk and that makes good sense.

This is great as it really helps drill down what is important in the specs of whatever I end up with.

I note that my existing laptop can be expanded out to 32GB of memory and this could be a useful stopgap in the short term.

So even though I haven't updated a given program it may start to slow up in time because Windows itself is demanding more memory? Do I understand that correctly?

-

Slightly more controversially... This endless update thing really doesn't sit well with me. My personal ethics are pretty much the opposite of this. I used to simply not update Windows for the life of a computer with me. (Sandbox for security) That worked out well for me since forever, until I got forced onto Win10. Now I can delay the updates but not stop them.

SO.... This has me in mind to upgrade the memory on my existing unit, carry on using it until I find just the right deal on an upgrade. Set up the new unit with my audio and image programs, and THEN.... Never connect it to the internet again. Use my old existing laptop with increased memory for web stuff. This might be pretty weird, however I'm liking the plan, it makes me feel empowered.

No Updates? Pah. Suits me just fine, that'll go nicely with my increasingly out of date 50R, and my perpetual license on two years ago's C1. REAPER I pay for the new versions even though I don't have to, (it's a perpetual license for a given release cycle as well), and don't even download them as I'm so grateful for the program and it's so affordable that I want to support them. It also runs happily as a portable install so I can use it wherever and update easily if ever I feel the need.

Thanks again to everyone, although I haven't jumped at anything yet, this is all super useful to me.

Cheers, Michael

unners said:

Something like this might be an option:

https://www.dell.com/en-au/outlet/refurbished-xps-15-9530-laptop5425

I'm not sold on 4k for a laptop screen personally, as I mentioned I'd rather use an external display anyway.

I find the Dell outlet pretty good value.

Cheers

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I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Greg7579 said:

I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Click to expand...

I find it just as easy to edit on a 2560x1600 display as a 4K display.

JimKasson said:

Greg7579 said:

I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Click to expand...

I find it just as easy to edit on a 2560x1600 display as a 4K display.

Click to expand...

Jim, I can't believe you just said that. We will have to disagree on that one....

Greg7579 said:

unners said:

Something like this might be an option:

https://www.dell.com/en-au/outlet/refurbished-xps-15-9530-laptop5425

I'm not sold on 4k for a laptop screen personally, as I mentioned I'd rather use an external display anyway.

I find the Dell outlet pretty good value.

Cheers

Click to expand...

I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Click to expand...

Short answer is I don't I have a 32" 4k monitor at home and twin 27" 4k monitors at work.

I've never needed to do critical editing on a laptop display alone. My laptop (main computer is a desktop) does have a 4k screen but I do get scaling issues with some software which is a bit annoying. I can totally understand the need for 4k if it's your sole display though.

unners said:

Greg7579 said:

unners said:

Something like this might be an option:

https://www.dell.com/en-au/outlet/refurbished-xps-15-9530-laptop5425

I'm not sold on 4k for a laptop screen personally, as I mentioned I'd rather use an external display anyway.

I find the Dell outlet pretty good value.

Cheers

Click to expand...

I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Click to expand...

Short answer is I don't I have a 32" 4k monitor at home and twin 27" 4k monitors at work.

I've never needed to do critical editing on a laptop display alone. My laptop (main computer is a desktop) does have a 4k screen but I do get scaling issues with some software which is a bit annoying. I can totally understand the need for 4k if it's your sole display though.

Click to expand...

Me too. I only edit on laptop on the road because I'm a travel shooter and I post to here and Flickr from the road after editing on LR on a 15-inch Dell XPS. Editing at home on the desktop with powerful GPU and a 32-inch Dell 6K? Big difference. Way more fun.

Just thought I'd confirm...

Setting my computer to task and watching the performance specs while it's doing it's thing confirms that the RAM is maxing out, spilling over into the SSD which is also hitting 100% (I'm presuming that's 100% of transfer speed.) CPU and GPU are barely off the floor so I'm hoping they stay more or less that way when there's more room to shove things around more quickly.

So I've ordered 32GB of upgrade RAM, I'll pop that in and take it from there. Most likely as I outlined above - keep this unit going for web use and get something more capable when I'm sure that I understand (and can afford) the setup that will see me through another decade of offline only audio and image work.

JimKasson said:

norjens said:

I will also add that 16 GB of RAM is the new minimum. Windows + Browser easily eat up 7+ these days, your existing 8 GB is very likely the main cause of lag when photo editing. When you run out the computer starts writing the overflow onto disk which is sloooooooow. You want 16GB minimum, 32 if you want to do a lot of batch edit operations on RAW files.

Click to expand...

After reboot, Lr and Chrome running. Lr is using 35 GB.

Click to expand...

I don't use Lightroom - please tell me that is after opening a bunch of images in the workspace and not the starting point :-O

Usually in C1 I import images in batches of ~70-200 at a time, putting me at 12-15GB memory usage. So there's plenty of headroom to my current 32GB capacity, but if I had one of the 100MP cameras I'd be getting close.

Just a note about RAM, many people see heavy RAM utilized and feel that they need to buy more. I think that a RAM upgrade could do quite a bit of good for you, but it's also worth noting that heavy RAM utilization isn't necessarily a bad thing. Modern operating systems will attempt to use more RAM as a cache, if nothing else, because unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Where you get into trouble is if the RAM is truly too small an amount for what you're trying to do, and the system needs to unload items from the RAM to your hard drive or SSD. This process is called "paging out" and the part that slows down performance is when the system tries to get the files back from your hard drive or SSD and into the RAM. If this process occurs, the system creates something called a swap file (Windows may refer to it as a "page file"). A very tiny swap file may not mean anything, but if your swap file is in the gigabytes range, you would definitely benefit from a RAM upgrade.

I'm not sure where to find the size of the swap file on Windows, but I leave this here as general advice for anyone else considering a system upgrade.

I would not buy a machine (laptop and certainly not desktop) with less than 32 ram and the boot SSD should be at least 2 TB now because those M.2 PCIe 4 2 TB chips are getting cheap. Ram and SSD storage are both dramatically dropping in price (unless you are buying at the cutting edge like I'm about to build with like PCIe Gen 5 4TB M.2 boot SSD and the absolute best Corsair Dominator Titanium RAM at 96 GB (using those non-standard 48 GB slabs).

But once guys start asking what to get at the 1500-dollar level and they are not buying in the US, I bow out of the discussion because the laptop I tell them to get is much more or a totally different package over there....

Just get 32 ram and a 2 TB M.2 PCIE 4 boot. If you don't move around or travel with that laptop, then instead get a PC with a 32-inch 4K screen. That is essential if you are a MF photographer.

norjens said:

JimKasson said:

norjens said:

I will also add that 16 GB of RAM is the new minimum. Windows + Browser easily eat up 7+ these days, your existing 8 GB is very likely the main cause of lag when photo editing. When you run out the computer starts writing the overflow onto disk which is sloooooooow. You want 16GB minimum, 32 if you want to do a lot of batch edit operations on RAW files.

Click to expand...

After reboot, Lr and Chrome running. Lr is using 35 GB.

Click to expand...

I don't use Lightroom - please tell me that is after opening a bunch of images in the workspace and not the starting point :-O

Click to expand...

It’s after importing 26 1.5 GB images and editing them one at a time.

norjens said:

Usually in C1 I import images in batches of ~70-200 at a time, putting me at 12-15GB memory usage. So there's plenty of headroom to my current 32GB capacity, but if I had one of the 100MP cameras I'd be getting close.

Click to expand...

--

Greg7579 said:

I would not buy a machine (laptop and certainly not desktop) with less than 32 ram and the boot SSD should be at least 2 TB now because those M.2 PCIe 4 2 TB chips are getting cheap. Ram and SSD storage are both dramatically dropping in price (unless you are buying at the cutting edge like I'm about to build with like PCIe Gen 5 4TB M.2 boot SSD and the absolute best Corsair Dominator Titanium RAM at 96 GB (using those non-standard 48 GB slabs).

Click to expand...

If the RAM is not user-replaceable then I'd say 16 GB at the minimum for photography applications, and 32 GB is more ideal to give you some breathing space to multitask. If it is user-replaceable then you're wasting money by getting the higher amount from the manufacturer; get the bare minimum that will work for you and then upgrade it yourself, either waiting for the price to come down in a year or two, or outright doing the upgrade yourself (which may be cheaper than optioning it from the manufacturer, even without waiting).

Boot drive size is similar: you'll pay a premium to have it upsized from the manufacturer. Either upgrade it yourself, or better yet, use external drives. The cost per unit of storage is cheaper. The only reason to upsize your boot drive is if you're frequently on the move (and thus don't want to bring your externals with you) or if you utilize applications that need to be installed there.

As an Apple user on an Apple Silicon system (Mac Studio), I unfortunately can't upgrade anything after purchase. I chose to upgrade the RAM (64 GB) and graphics cores, but left the internal SSD at 512 GB. I have a Thunderbolt 3-connected 1 TB NVME drive that I use for photo ingestion and processing (benchmarked it is pretty close in performance to the internal SSD), and an 8 TB SATA SSD for processed photo cataloging (the software was too sluggish on a standard HDD). My NAS has a combined volume of somewhere in the 30 TB range split across two volumes for video footage and file archival. All data is backed up to an online backup service as well. I've had some rare occasions where the 512 GB boot drive did cause a headache, and when I upgrade in a few years I'll probably make sure that the boot drive is 1 TB... but this system works nicely otherwise and is more cost-efficient than if I were to max out the internal drive capacity through Apple.

JimKasson said:

Scottelly said:

JimKasson said:

Scottelly said:

GodSpeaks said:

Make sure it includes WiFi-6E in it's specs. That's the new 6GHz band.

Click to expand...

Why? What difference does that make?

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Faster transfers, if your Internet connection supports them, or you want to use a local NAS. But you can also use a USB or Thunderbolt Ethernet dongle.

Click to expand...

But 802-11ac is so ridiculously fast that almost nobody has a connection faster than what they can use with their Wi-Fi. I'm using my inexpensive Dell and just checked Fast.com - my result:



I have a friend who has a faster connection, but not many people do, from what I can tell. This connection speed will become pretty normal over the next few years, but it's far from necessary, and far from what 802-11ac can handle. Most servers on the Web seem to be much slower than this connection, though I guess they'll speed up too over the years to come. The fact is though that 802-11ac is way faster, and could support a connection two or three times as fast easily. I doubt I will ever need more than 802-11ac over the next few years. I probably don't even need what I've got now. 802-11n is probably fine.

Click to expand...

I have Comcast, and I get 1.3 Gb/s down and 40 Mb/s up.

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Holy cow!

JimKasson said:

But mesh Wi-Fi with no wired backhaul more than halves that download speed in some locations . And that’s with 6E.

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I'm not sure what 6E is, buy I see now why you want a computer with super fast Wi-Fi. The idea of being able to access large photo and 4K video files from a home file server, using a tablet AND my laptop (and possibly even my phone) does make me think that faster Wi-Fi just might make sense after all.





--
Scott Barton Kennelly

Greg7579 said:

JimKasson said:

Greg7579 said:

I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Click to expand...

I find it just as easy to edit on a 2560x1600 display as a 4K display.

Click to expand...

Jim, I can't believe you just said that. We will have to disagree on that one....

Click to expand...

Since viewing a photo full screen means you are not viewing it at 100% (1:1) then what difference does it make if you use a screen that's 4K, 1080, or some other resolution? In fact, I find 4K only seems usable on a very large screen (i.e. a 55" TV). Otherwise I have to view the screen scaled to a different resolution anyway.

Greg7579 said:

Michael Floyd said:

Greg7579 said:

Do you game at all? There is only one question that matters really.... What is the max you can spend? Tell me that and I will tell you what laptop to buy this week.

One thing for absolute sure.... 4K. If you don't travel much consider the Dell 17-inch XPS lineup. But if you get on and off planes much, 15 inch is what I do.

But I think my next laptop will be the loaded-out Dell XPS 17 4K, and it is going to be about 3,500 bucks.

But that probably doesn't apply to you. Give me a price. I'll tell you the laptop.

This is my specialty and I track it very closely and with great interest week to week....

No Apple though - I can't advise you on that. Only rigs with Windows, Intel CPU and NVidia GPU will I comment or advise.

I track it closely now because I'm building a new top-end PC in December and getting a new laptop very soon. I'm waiting on a few things that are about to happen.

Click to expand...

Thanks Greg, much appreciated. I like your approach. : )

Max spend - AUD $2300. That's about USD $1500. I know that doesn't buy me the BeezKneez. C'est la vie I'm afraid. And it would have to be a significant improvement over what I have now to warrant the spend, see my OP for details of my current laptop.

I don't game at all.

I do get the 4k thing, however they actually drive me a bit bats as all the UI elements get so small. I just end up pulling the resolution down anyhow. Yes, I know they are larger on a bigger screen -but it's a circle of loss and gain that just grows and grows. Far more important for me to have a screen that can be properly calibrated. The screen for me is simply a step on the way to the print, I don't want my images to look better on the the screen than on the wall. 15" is my sweet spot. Touch.

Fan noise is important. Minimal.

I'm open minded to left field suggestions for sure.

Thank you!

Click to expand...

I think it might be best for me to stay out of this one because I'm in the US and the deals we get are so different. We are half a world apart in where we live and shop.

At the 1500 USD level, maximizing deals and maybe getting one generation back is essential to get the most computational power for that low-mid-level laptop range. 4K will not cause you UI, productivity, font or scaling issues with Windows on a 15 or 17-inch laptop. You have to shop your deals and get the best CPU and GPU you can get for 1500 bucks. Windows will scale at 250% on a 4K 15-inch laptop.

You and I don't game, but since you don't want 4K, you might shop gaming laptops on sale (those are great for photography and editing images). With LR you need as much GPU power and VRAM as you can get, and you need 32 RAM.

Click to expand...

Wow! Is Lightroom really THAT slow? I've been using other programs on an i5 with just 8 GB of RAM, and it seems fine . . . but I don't load up a heap of raw files. I edit those one at a time in RawTherapee or some other program.

That advice is Apple related and the main reason I don't do Apple. I'm a builder and a part picker.

I'm telling the OP the bare minimum that I would tolerate on a windows laptop and what is becoming standard these days. 32 ram and a 2 TB M.2 boot.

That said, his market is different than mine. He is spending only 1500 bucks. He is going to have to shop very carefully in order to maximize his ram, CPU and GPU.

You are right on the external drives on laptops. Any laptop I buy would of course have at least two TB4 ports.

If he doesn't move around a lot he needs to get a PC vs laptop.

Michael Floyd said:

norjens said:

I will also add that 16 GB of RAM is the new minimum. Windows + Browser easily eat up 7+ these days, your existing 8 GB is very likely the main cause of lag when photo editing. When you run out the computer starts writing the overflow onto disk which is sloooooooow. You want 16GB minimum, 32 if you want to do a lot of batch edit operations on RAW files.

Click to expand...

Thank you norjens, This point is especially enlightening for me.

I just had a look - and indeed, Capture One idling and this web browser open has my memory usage sitting on 93% ! I understand about writing the overflow to disk and that makes good sense.

This is great as it really helps drill down what is important in the specs of whatever I end up with.

I note that my existing laptop can be expanded out to 32GB of memory and this could be a useful stopgap in the short term.

So even though I haven't updated a given program it may start to slow up in time because Windows itself is demanding more memory? Do I understand that correctly?

-

Slightly more controversially... This endless update thing really doesn't sit well with me. My personal ethics are pretty much the opposite of this. I used to simply not update Windows for the life of a computer with me. (Sandbox for security) That worked out well for me since forever, until I got forced onto Win10. Now I can delay the updates but not stop them.

SO.... This has me in mind to upgrade the memory on my existing unit, carry on using it until I find just the right deal on an upgrade. Set up the new unit with my audio and image programs, and THEN.... Never connect it to the internet again. Use my old existing laptop with increased memory for web stuff. This might be pretty weird, however I'm liking the plan, it makes me feel empowered.

No Updates? Pah. Suits me just fine, that'll go nicely with my increasingly out of date 50R, and my perpetual license on two years ago's C1. REAPER I pay for the new versions even though I don't have to, (it's a perpetual license for a given release cycle as well), and don't even download them as I'm so grateful for the program and it's so affordable that I want to support them. It also runs happily as a portable install so I can use it wherever and update easily if ever I feel the need.

Thanks again to everyone, although I haven't jumped at anything yet, this is all super useful to me.

Cheers, Michael

Click to expand...

I say go for the RAM upgrade. It might only cost $50, and double the speed of some operations.

I remember going from a standard display to a "retina" display was, unfortunately, eye-opening. I say "unfortunately" because I had thought that a lot of my photos were sharply in focus, and under the display with higher pixel density, missed focus was much more obvious. Ignorance was bliss.

If you zoom in 100% and track around a photo then in theory the screen size and resolution may not matter. But it saves a lot of time if you have a larger screen with high pixel density so that you can tell more easily without needing to pixel-peep every single photo.

Velocity of Sound said:

I remember going from a standard display to a "retina" display was, unfortunately, eye-opening. I say "unfortunately" because I had thought that a lot of my photos were sharply in focus, and under the display with higher pixel density, missed focus was much more obvious. Ignorance was bliss.

If you zoom in 100% and track around a photo then in theory the screen size and resolution may not matter. But it saves a lot of time if you have a larger screen with high pixel density so that you can tell more easily without needing to pixel-peep every single photo.

Click to expand...

Listen to this. When I started shooting GFX I listened to the pros and invested in a pro 32-inch 4K IPS ASUS ProArt monitor. At the time, it was very expensive (now they are not so expensive).

It was an awakening. That is when everyone shooting the 50 s and r was learning that their old shooting habits did not work with GFX. The image fidelity and detail is so high that you immediately noticed any camera shake on a monitor like that at full resolution. Everyone was saying that you needed 4x factor vs 2, so handheld you needed 1/200 on a 50 mm shot to freeze those pixels. That is when I started shooting every GFX shot on a monopod at least. Then IBIS came to the rescue in the GFX 100.

The point is, if you are operating on a monitor that is not at least 4K and a newer tech, you are missing out. Period. (Full Stop as you Brits say).

This is one of those cases where there is no argument. To deny it is to deny that the Moon is round, as seen from Earth.

Scottelly said:

Greg7579 said:

JimKasson said:

Greg7579 said:

I shoot on the road, and I absolutely must have at least 15-inch 4K and 17 would be better.

How do you guys edit your raw files without 4K?

Click to expand...

I find it just as easy to edit on a 2560x1600 display as a 4K display.

Click to expand...

Jim, I can't believe you just said that. We will have to disagree on that one....

Click to expand...

Since viewing a photo full screen means you are not viewing it at 100% (1:1) then what difference does it make if you use a screen that's 4K, 1080, or some other resolution? In fact, I find 4K only seems usable on a very large screen (i.e. a 55" TV). Otherwise I have to view the screen scaled to a different resolution anyway.

Click to expand...

The difference at 1:1 is how much of the image you can see on the screen. Just 10%? 50%? for some editing tasks it might not matter (global denoising eg). For others it can mean having to keep zooming in and out, a real pain.

I use 5k, and pretty close. If I count my tablet or phone, I'm using 200+ PPI quite a bit. As with DPI and prints on a wall a LOT depends on the viewing distance. Phone, tablet, laptop, monitor, TV—all might need different resolutions because of your distance from them.

And speaking of monitors, I wouldn't invest in a laptop or monitor without at least DisplayHDR 1000 capability these days. I know it's early days for HDR in stills (been here a while for video), but the difference is striking. And now that Adobe (and Apple to some extend) is all in on it, we'll maybe see more adoption. That 4 stops of extra DR is quite nice, and since so many mobile devices have HDR capable displays they may appreciate the exta oomph too.

Not sure about the PC side, but the two Macbook Pros have XDR displays that do very well with HDR.