Seeking Advice on Laptop Purchase for Creative Media Work

J

JonFri

Member
Hey everyone,

I'm in the process of considering a significant purchase and wanted to tap into the community's insights. I'm looking at the PC Specialist Recoil laptop, and I'm curious if anyone has experience or thoughts on how well it performs, especially in the creative media industry.

My primary use case involves working with Blender and other 3D software like Unreal Engine 5. Originally, I was planning to go for a similar-spec desktop all be it slightly more powerful, but the laptop seems to offer a comparable configuration at a more budget-friendly price point. The added bonus of portability is also a major plus for my workflow.

Here are the specs for the original desktop and the Recoil laptop:

Original Desktop (Quote Reference: 2621565): £5566

  • Processor: Intel® CoreTM i9 24-Core Processor i9-13900KS
  • Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER (LGA1700, DDR5, USB 3.2, PCIe 5.0,
    WIFI6E) - ARGB Ready
  • Memory: 96GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR5 5600MHz (4 x 24GB)
  • Graphics Card: 24GB ASUS TUF GEFORCE RTX 4090 OC EDITION
  • Storage: 1st M.2 SSD Drive 2TB SAMSUNG 990 PRO M.2, PCIe 4.0 NVMe
    1st Storage Drive 8TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s
  • Power Supply: CORSAIR 1000W RMx SERIESTM - MODULAR 80 PLUS GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
  • Processor Cooling: CORSAIR iCUE H150i ELITE LCD XT RGB CPU Cooler
Recoil 17 R LC Laptop (Quote Reference: 2730533): £3550

  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i9 24 Core Processor 13900HX (5.4GHz Turbo)
  • Memory: 64GB Corsair 4800MHz SODIMM DDR5 (2 x 32GB)
  • Graphics Card: NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 4090 - 16.0GB GDDR6 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
  • Storage: 1st M.2 SSD Drive 4TB SAMSUNG 990 PRO M.2, PCIe 4.0 NVMe
    2nd M.2 SSD Drive 4TB SAMSUNG 990 PRO M.2, PCIe 4.0 NVMe
  • Liquid Series® Laptop Cooling: PCS Liquid Series® Laptop Cooler
Considering the substantial price difference and the portability factor, do you think the Recoil laptop would meet my needs for working with graphic-intensive software? I'm particularly interested in any major pros and cons you think I should be aware of.

Looking forward to hearing your experiences and insights!

Best regards,
Jon
 
Scott

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
I wouldn't recommend a 13k series desktop, they are end of life and run incredibly hot with insanely high temperatures involved. An AM5 build would be far better all round IMO. It doesn't look to be a very well rounded build with some overspends and underspends from the snip of the quotation that you have shared.

With the laptop you will need to be very mindful of what you are purchasing.
It'll be quite large and very heavy. It'll look quite old by comparison to sleek/low power models as it needs to dissipate a ton of heat which makes it chunky.
It's one and done, there's no upgrade path.
When doing anything intensive the battery won't last any length of time and the battery also won't allow full power utilisation of the CPU/GPU at any one time. Off the power it will be far less powerful than what you are used to.
The 4090 laptop version is nowhere near as powerful as the 4090 desktop version. I hate the naming variation as it's not a fair comparison for customers. The laptop has around half the cuda cores as the desktop, which will roughly half your performance when using them.

In your shoes I would get some advice on a high end desktop. Link below for what we would be looking for, some insight into the way we think about things and some general useful information:

Please read before posting:- Collaboration of Helpful Hints

NB: These forums are not an official support channel. None of us work for PCS, we're all either customers or techies who just like to help out where possible. For any official support, you need to contact PCS directly either through your PCS account, or via the contact details on the main...
www.pcspecialist.co.uk www.pcspecialist.co.uk

I would then look to get a decent laptop, that's a proper laptop and not a DTR, I would use the internet to remote access my desktop to then work with clients. When set up appropriately you wouldn't even know you weren't using your desktop. I currently use Moonlight and Sunshine to stream my Desktop anywhere in the world I have access. A decent VPN and some initial security setup is all that's required for peace of mind.
 
Tron1982

Tron1982

VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
I'd like to present you some apologies for my absence...
It was a rough week ...
So, when you'll give us your answer, we'll come back to help you ^^
 
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