New Laptop Time - thoughts on configurations?

Glitch

My laptop is nearing end of life. So starting the process of looking at new ones. From a CCC program process perspective what hardware do you suggest? (Yes I know, more is better - but unfortunately money places limits)

1. Is 1 TB enough storage?
2. How much ram
3. It is my understanding that CCC does all it's "thinking" in RAM; how important is the Video card?
4. I know it's early yet, but do we have any direction on the impact of the next version of CCC?

JulianDracos

1. 1 TB is probably enough. It really depends on what other stuff you want on the PC
2. I would say at least 16 GB (but this has nothing to do with CC3+)Currently, cc3+ is 32 bit software. That means it can only use 4GB of RAM. So more than that does not help CC3. It does help other programs, helps multitasking, and windows is a RAM hog.
3. Video card isn't that important as the work is handled by the CPU. Regarding the CPU, you want a high clock speed. The number of cores doesn't really help that much. I think any video card will be fine.
4. My guess is that CC4 will be 64 bit. If that is the case, you will find the program to be faster and smoother and it will be able to take advantage of multiple cores and use more than 4 GB of RAM. They might also design it to take better advantage of a GPU instead of the CPU for rendering.

Kertis Henderson

I have two suggestions. I agree with what JulianDracos wrote, by the way.

Don't get a 4K display. I love them for everything except CC3. Scaling CC3 for 4K doesn't seem to work for me. A 1080 HD display is perfect for CC3, in my opinion.

Get SSD for storage. I think it's hard to find a model without SSD. It's important enough to mention, though.

Monsen

I do mostly agree with JulianDracos and Kertis Henderson here. 1TB drive/16GB ram is fine, and as Julian says, a fast processor is better than a slow one with many cores, although a certain amount of cores is highly useful (I recommend 6 or more, but most CPU's will fulfill that today)

As for the screen, I fully agree with Kertis, don't get a 4K one. I used to have one on my old Work laptop, and it was a pain for most things. I prefer to go a bit higher than a full HD (1080p) screen though, I find a 1440p one much better. But there are two factors here, first of all, your eyesight, 1440p naturally makes things smaller (and buying a 1440p just to increase the scale factor in Windows is a waste), so make sure you're comfortable with the size, otherwise do go for that 1080p one. And of course, a higher resolution screen do mean CC3+ is a bit harder to run, so it should only go along with a somewhat good CPU, if you go budget on the CPU then do not get a 1440p screen.

My own laptop is a Lenovo Legion Pro 5 (1TB/16GB/i7-13000hx/RTX3070/2560x1600), a machine I find well suited to most task and pretty good value for money.

Glitch

Thanks for the suggestions, I had not considered that a high res monitor would impact drawing / selection (its a little counter intuitive, I had thought the higher res would be better - but I can see where it would require more precision to select and draw). It sounds like I should go to a two monitor setup- keep my existing monitor and use it for CCC; and a newer monitor for other work?

Monsen

One of the reasons it is bad for CC3+ is that a higher resolution monitor simply have more pixels. CC3+ needs to render a new image to present on screen from the vector data every time things change, and rendering a 4K image takes 4 times as much cpu time as rendering a 1080p one. Since it is already working as fast as it can, that basically translates to 4 times as long in actual time as well, so a 4K monitor is simply slower to work on. This will be more or less true for any vector-based application, while raster-based editors works differently, and mostly just need a bit more of memory.

The net effect is offset by the power of your CPU, so the more powerful the CPU, the less of an actual impact a high-res monitor will have.

Windows do have a scaling factor you can apply to your monitor, but this just make it behave like a lower res one, so it is a waste of money, and not all programs work correctly with the scaling (CC3+ works mostly, but there are some issues in some dialogs).

Of course though, all of these considerations are mostly related to the internal monitor of the laptop, since that can't be changed once the machine has been bought.

Having multiple external monitors are always a good thing though. On my fixed setup, I have 4 (+1 (+1)), it really helps productivity.

taustinoc

You can also just change the Windows setting for resolution, though that has its own issues if you want to change it back and forth regularly (like making a mess of icons on the desktop).