nVidia RTX for laptop

poorman_65

I have to pick up a new laptop and want to get something with respectable DAZ Iray rendering capabilities. I'm getting a little confused with the RTX options and was hoping someone could make a recommendation.

I have an nVidia GTX 1070 TI in my desktop but I'm not sure how the laptop RTXs compare to that.

It looks like there are multiple versions. For example, I see 2070, 2070 Max Q, and it looks like 2070 Super Max is comiing. I'd rather my laptop not run super hot when rendering, but I also want the performance to be good.

Also, from a price/performance standpoint, would a 2060, 2070 or 2080 be the most bang for the buck?

magog_a4eb71ab

Its going to run hot regardless, which is why you would want a cooling pad for it. I haven't really looked around much to see what all is possible for laptops, but so far I've only seen single 2070 configurations available. No 2080's or anything like that yet, but I could be wrong. Not sure about the 2060's, but the 2070 & 2080 both have 8 Gb VRAM, which is generally what you want as a minimum for iray rendering.

DustRider

I would avoid anything with a Max Q, unless performance isn't a big issue, or you really want a very thin/light laptop. They reduce the the base clock speed quite a bit on the Max Q laptops so they can run the RTX 20XX without heating issues. You'll lose about 30-40% performance with a Max Q version. But, the upside is you can have an RTX GPU in a very portable thin laptop. There is a benchmark thread here that only has a couple laptop GPU's (mine being one of them), but it will give you a general idea how an RTX 20xx might stack up against your GTX 1070 Ti.

There are many laptops with RTX 2080's, but they will cost about $300-$400 more than a RTX 2070. I recommend getting a gaming laptop, as they will have better cooling and performance than a thin/light laptop. I've used laptops for 3D for many years, and have never been disappointed with a gaming laptop (but some can get rather noisy when under full load). My last laptop was from Prostar, a small custom shop in the LA area, and I was quite happy with it (it's still going strong, I just couldn't upgrade the memory to the 128Gb I need now). You can custom configure and buy laptops directly from their website, or get a pre-built system from Amazon. Another DAZ user recently got one similar to this system, and they were quite happy with it. In Nov. I got an MSI GT75 Titan with a RTX 2070 and an i9-9900K (128Gb RAM) and love it (custom order from Xotic PC). The RTX 2070 is faster than a GTX 1080ti with Iray (I tested a scene in Blender, and my RTX 2070 was faster than a dual GTX 1080ti system). The MSI GT75 Titan is really quiet when rendering with Iray, but it is a huge laptop, and requires two power bricks (and has 8Tb srorage. The Prostar system I linked to above has a single power brick, and is a nice trade off between a big gaming laptop like mine, and a thin/light laptop. If I didn't need 128GB of RAM, I would have gone with another Prostar, but they didn't offer that option. Their computers are custom built Clevo (Sager) laptops. Clevo manufactures many of the major brand laptops, and sell their own to custom builders, so you get top quality and a really good price.

poorman_65

Thanks for the info. Very helpful.