Before I get into trouble for high jacking threads again, has anyone recently bought a new laptop for Photoshop and other Adobe apps, or is up to date with the current state of play? My 19 inch Dell must be six or seven years old now. I has its maximum 4Gb RAM, a new HDD, and Windows 7, and has been stripped to bare bones, but it’s time to accept it has given its all, and time to replace it. The problem is, I am more or less clueless about what to replace it with.
Cost is not a huge issue, but I like to keep bang-for-buck in mind. I’ve wandered through several possibilities, and am currently thinking in terms of an MSI gaming system with this sort of spec:
17 inch full 1080 non reflective display.
I7-3630QM at 2.4Ghz (3.4Ghz turbo mode)
16Gb RAM (I can up this to 32)
GTX680 with 4Gb DDR5
Two 128Gb SSD in raid0
One 750Gb HDD (unknown spec)
3 off USB3
2 off USB2
1 off eSATA
HDMI
D-Sub
(it will drive three external monitors)
AFAIK I can only get it with Windows 8 — I would prefer Windows 7
Some of these gaming rigs have SLI’d graphics, which I obviously don’t want, so I’d like to make sure this one doesn’t?
This would cost me NZ$3000 (US$2335) I can get next generation CPU and graphics for another NZ$1000, but some of those options come with Quadro mobile graphics, which I believe are not ideal for Photoshop, Prem Pro, After Effects etc.
I would very much welcome feedback and advice before pressing the button on this.
TIA