New laptop advice for image processing?

[Penguin]

Hi All,

I am looking to get a new laptop for the family that I will use for PixInsight. The old one is getting a bit sluggish but I'm hoping it is still good enough will go in the observatory I am building to control the scope/mount/camera etc if I clear out all the crap it has accumulated. So I am wondering what I should look for in the new machine.

I gather that image processing tends to go faster with a dedicated graphics card (this also opens up the possibility of playing Elite Dangerous one it :-) ). Can the forum make any recommendations as to what I should look out for? My budget is for up to around £500. Is an Ebay refurbished job my best bet?

[PeterCPC]

My experience is that a desktop would be the best option rather than a laptop. After several laptop failures I got a Zoostorm desktop and it is so much faster at everything.

Peter

[JonC]

You would be better off getting a desktop, you get a lot more bang for your £££. If you absolutely have to have a laptop then an ASUS ROG is one of the better more powerful laptops, you should just be able to get one 2md hand. The Problem with a lot of the more powerful laptops is heat, they cant shift it easily, so the bigger the better in this respect, battery life tends to be poor, they are heavy, the graphics cards in them have a tendency to fail (due to heat most frequently). Having put up some negatives I have to say I wouldn't be without my aging Asus ROG laptop, I use it for a range of stuff including lightroom, video editing, etc. 2 hard drive bays plus Bluray drive fives me plenty of options, currently have an SSD main drive and a 1TB storage drive fitted. When researching laptops a lot of the reviews found that smaller ones couldn't run at full speed due to high heat, the CPU and GPU ended up being throttles, hence my one is 17"

[steppenwolf]

The biggest problem that I find with image processing with a laptop PC is that the viewing angle is never constant so contrast can vary between processing sessions. I have tried a grey-scale bar to give me some kind of consistency but it really isn't anywhere near as good as a 'fixed' monitor on a desktop PC. A reasonable compromise might be to use a powerful laptop PC with a desktop monitor specifically set up and calibrated for image processing but a desktop PC would still be the best choice.

[Alien 13]

I use a laptop and it is extremely powerful, stays cool, has a screen calibrated with a Spyder 5 and works fine for processing, has reasonable battery life, lots of USB 3 ports (and a thunderbolt), SSD and normal hard drives, lots of RAM but you could get a similar specked  desktop for half the price.

Alan

[RayD]

I find for me the restricting issue with using a laptop for processing is the physical size of the screen, with even the larger ones still only being 17".  Being related to Mr Magoo I find this really hard to work with, so have to resort to a removable USB3 SSD on my mounts' mini PC being used to transfer the images to my 5k Mac for processing, which to be fair is probably then a bit overkill, but lovely to work with. 

If the laptop is to be used for other things, as you appear to indicate, then maybe a dock with a decent monitor attached for when you are processing as noted by Steppenwolf would be useful, as for £500 I don't think you'll get one with a screen and graphics like the excellent Alienware Alan has.

[kendg]

I would get a refurb laptop just for image acquisition (or clean you existing one) and a desktop for processing. 

The desktop will probably be cheaper and faster and the laptop doesn't need to have a lot of horsepower.

[Hixs]

Echo comments about desktop being better.

500 notes buys an OK laptop (media, web browsing etc), but not something you'd want to use for heavy processing (typing from a 500 euro laptop..).

For heavy processing you want:

Decent quad core (intel i7 of some description)

SSD drive (250gb min)

Lots of RAM (min 16gb)

Good graphics card 

Good quality screen

A laptop with all that will be minimum 1k+

 

edit: forum have a reset?? I had more posts then this last time i logged in.

[Penguin]

Thanks for all the advice, I'll have a think. Unfortunately, it does have to be a laptop as it will also be the family machine. To be fair, I've been using Pixinsight on my current laptop (HP 250 G1 with an I3 processor, 4GB RAM and inbuilt graphics) so pretty much anything will be an improvement!

[Alien 13]

The inbuilt graphics of modern machines are quite good, I run mine with some older games and they beat the old G force 4 into the ground, the addition of win 10 lots of RAM with SSD with an i5 or i7 processor should make quite a difference.

Alan