Hey guys, I am a professional graphic designer/web developer, and I am looking for a new laptop so I can do these things on the go.
My current laptop has a i5-2520m and Intel HD 3000 Graphics, which is starting to show it’s age. I’m looking for a laptop that has at least a 14" screen and is $800 or less… portability and weight isn’t super important, but I do wanna move around with it easily.
I will be using photoshop and illustrator heavily, and maybe edit on Premiere Pro (Probably won’t render though) any recommendations would be sweet, thanks guys!
Check out Asus ROG laptops. Great specs for the price(i7 QC, discrete graphics, 8 gb RAM, 1 tb of storage/ $1100) Might be a bit pricey(for you, don't take it offencivly), but you are looking at laptops, so its going to be a higher price to get premium. Also, much better price to specs than something like Alienware or somebody elsethat claims to have great performance and great at graphic design(insert Apple reference here)
My grandma bought a laptop at Best Buy recently, it's an AMD A8 (2.something ghz quad core) with 4GB of RAM and a 750GB drive. It comes with a 15.6 inch screen and Windows 8, but I can vouch for it's ability to run Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 just fine (so far anyway lol).
I wouldn't be terribly impressed with it, except that its pretty thin, and it can be yours today for the value price of $300.
There's also the Lenovo G505s, but those are getting hard to find. It's awesome though, my friend has one (the one with an A10, not the Intel one)
Thanks for the suggestions. Discrete graphics is probably not necessary for what I need to do. Cuda would be awesome to have, but not sure if that's realistic in my price range. K4, those would probably work if they were a little more powerful, I'll look at those though.
What are you guys's experience with buying used/refurbished products? I have mostly avoided that for things like laptops... is it worth searching for stuff like on ebay?