Need help to pick the "best" laptop for Pix4D

AndersE · Jan 22, 2017

Im about to buy a laptop in order to process data while Im out of my office. I have found 3 different laptops which are within the budget. There are not huge difference between them, but still I want to make sure to pick the "best" one.

It will mainly be used for processing dataset of ~150 images(20 Mpix, ~8MB each)

Laptop 1
i7, 6700HQ
16GB ram
SSD 256 GB (and one free SATA Connection)
GeForce GTX 960M, 2 GB.

Laptop 2
i7, 6700HQ
16GB ram
SSD 516 GB
GeForce GTX 950M, 2 GB.
DVD (which I later plan to remove and replace with a SDD/HDD)

Laptop 3
i7, 6700HQ
16GB ram
SSD 128 GB + 1TB HDD 5400rpm
GeForce GTX 960M, 4 GB.

They all have IPS screens, running on Win10 and costs exactly the same. Im leaning towards laptop 3. And later on replace the 128 SSD with a 256 or 512. But maybe 128GB SSD will be sufficent to run Win + Pix4D and process the datasets. Any recommendations before I press that "Buy"-button?

kitefiter · Jan 22, 2017

IMHOP all three are very adequate for processing.. It made a huge difference when I put Pix4d on an SSD with the processing files. I have noticed that the graphics card is doing a lot of the calculation work so No.3 might help speeding things up.

I just checked a project with 180 photos and it generated 3.6 gb of files including the photos. A 750 photo project generated 13.8 gb with the photos. I was only producing a cloud and an orthomosaic. So lots of storage.

Slackware · Jan 22, 2017

usually with laptops the ram comes OUT of your system memory. That is one reason I kept my hp, it has a real physical video sub system in it.
But you can replace the terabyte drive with an ssd hybrid drive later.

leegreen13 · Jan 23, 2017

AndersE said:
Im about to buy a laptop in order to process data while Im out of my office. I have found 3 different laptops which are within the budget. There are not huge difference between them, but still I want to make sure to pick the "best" one.

It will mainly be used for processing dataset of ~150 images(20 Mpix, ~8MB each)

Laptop 1

i7, 6700HQ

16GB ram

SSD 256 GB (and one free SATA Connection)

GeForce GTX 960M, 2 GB.

Laptop 2

i7, 6700HQ

16GB ram

SSD 516 GB

GeForce GTX 950M, 2 GB.

DVD (which I later plan to remove and replace with a SDD/HDD)

Laptop 3

i7, 6700HQ

16GB ram

SSD 128 GB + 1TB HDD 5400rpm

GeForce GTX 960M, 4 GB.

They all have IPS screens, running on Win10 and costs exactly the same. Im leaning towards laptop 3. And later on replace the 128 SSD with a 256 or 512. But maybe 128GB SSD will be sufficent to run Win + Pix4D and process the datasets. Any recommendations before I press that "Buy"-button?

All three will perform nearly the same. You have only spec'd different drives sizes, but not types, and slightly different graphics cards. The CPU is only a 4 core, and the drives you have chosen may only be SSD SATA. Be sure to get SSD M.2 PCIe drives which are 5x faster than SSD SATA. You will see a huge improvement with a faster drive, and a faster CPU.

I suggest :
4Ghz CPU with at least 4 cores (not sure if there is a 6 core laptop yet)
512Gb PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD - 2500MB/s Read & 1500MB/s Write
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 980M 8GB GDDR5 PCIe