• Laptop primarily for corel x5

    Posted by Keith Newton on February 19, 2011 at 10:22 pm

    I am looking for a laptop, to run corel x5 mainly, I have around £700 to spend.

    I have been looking at the Dell XPS15, its about the cheapest i5 with seperate 1gb graphics card I have found, it has the 1024 (MB) NVIDIA® GT420M GeForce®. Is this card a good option? I would obviously consider any i5 powered machine with a more powerful card within my price range.

    The main reason for the i5 ‘need’ was just a bit of future proofing, is this necessary for a machine that will only be used for creating graphics?

    I am very new to graphics on computers, its mostly an assumption on my part that I am looking for something with as good a graphics card I can achieve for the money. Would I be correct in assuming this?

    I don’t really intend to use the machine to print from, just mainly to have at hand to work on graphics in my spare/home time. I have a good desktop that I currently run from.

    Any help on choosing the right machine would be great!

    Thanks,

    Keith.

    Keith Newton replied 13 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • David Rogers

    Member
    February 19, 2011 at 10:47 pm

    Doing graphics work does use a certain amount of a graphics card’s capabilities but your average card is really designed to render fast moving ‘gaming’ graphics and is wasted on the like of redrawing otherwise static images that occur in our industry. MOST of the actual work in rendering & manipulating say a large, complex photoshop / corel image is done by the actual main processor and not by a super-duper graphics card.
    3D animations on the other hand…

    As with all things – just get the best you can afford in terms of processor speed & onboard RAM unless gaming is your thing and you want a jack-of-all-trades machine.

    Check out EBUYER.com (not EBAY) for deals.

    You will likely be restricted to a 4Gb machine unless you added another £400 to the pot…mad isn’t it.

    Onboard storage – basically ignore it. That’s what external backup drives & networks are for!

    Hey, well that’s my opinion – there’s sure to be dozens more.

    Dave

  • Keith Newton

    Member
    February 20, 2011 at 3:44 am

    Thanks for the info, decided to go for the xps, hopefully its a good choice.

  • Dave Rowland

    Member
    February 20, 2011 at 1:22 pm

    i have an old Dell inspiron 9400 with the fastest 3Ghz processor which I found slightly faster (in corel draw) then my office Dell Vostro Quad Core at 2.4Ghz

    Processor quality and memory speed makes all the difference… not gaming rigs!

  • Keith Newton

    Member
    February 20, 2011 at 2:25 pm

    Well I chose the machine with the best numbers I could afford, as far as I’m aware its not a gaming specific machine, hopefully its a good choice.

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