I got the UX305CA (1920x1080 version, 8GB RAM) and I love it! Small, light, completely silent, and the screen colors are great out of the box! I calibrated both my once-top-of-the-line home laptop (Clevo W870CU from 2009, i7, 8GB RAM) and this one side by side one evening, both to D65. The UX305CA’s screen covers 98% of the sRGB gamut, is capable of a very high luminance (I capped it at 120cd/m2 but it could do more), does not change much after calibration and profiling (meaning it looks great and the colors are close to what they should be even if you don’t have a colorimeter), and the colors look good from a wide range of angles. In comparison, my home laptop’s screen covers about 70% sRGB, fails to reach 120cd/m2 after calibration and profiling (reaches just 80cd/m3 - if I reset the video card gamma table to linear it gets significantly brighter but that’s because it gets significantly bluer), changes very much after calibration and profiling, and the colors change dramatically with a small change in viewing angle.
Haven’t processed raw photos with it yet. Your question is not really a question of speed, it’s a question of RAM. This one has 8GB, so you can process raw photos and run Firefox and do whatever and it will be snappy as long as you don’t run out of RAM. Further, GIMP (2.9) is extremely slow and non-optimized regardless of hardware - getting it to run faster is a question of optimizing code, not of throwing more CPUs and matches and gasoline at it. I hope this gets addressed once the tremendous task of porting everything to GEGL/BABL is done.
My OS with KDE Plasma loads in seconds from a cold boot and feels very snappy. Can’t say the same for my i7 home laptop.
The touchpad works great, for a touchpad. It has no faults or jumps or anything like that. There is one thing I wasn’t expecting, and it’s a touchpad-shortcut that lets you scroll without having to move the cursor over to the scrollbar. Odd things can seem to happen before you discover and identify it. Once you get used to it, after an hour, it not only stops annoying you, but becomes handy. There might even be a way of controlling it through touchpad settings in your OS. Still, I don’t like touchpads in any shape or form and mostly use a mouse.
Well, could also be disk I suppose – my desktop has 8GB and an i7-4558U, but the drive is a “hybrid spindle/SSD” (just 8GB is SSD) instead of real SSD, and there web browsing while exporting is really awful compared to my Thinkpad with 4GB and an i7 2640M but a real SSD.
Since I started this thread, I owe it an update. I was quite intrigued with the ASUS UX305CA when @Morgan_Hardwood mentioned it. It has an absolutely beautiful display. Ultimately, though, I couldn’t get past the 13.3" display size (largely due to UI text in RT and DT and code in editors)…I don’t normally glasses but would have to with that display size. ASUS also has a 15.6" UX501VW with a gorgeous display, unfortunately with a price to match.
I wound up getting a HP Envy 15-as010ca, which is 8GB/1TB and has a decent quality IPS FHD display, which I have not yet calibrated (too much time in that code lately!). It’s been problem free with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I’ve done a small amount of RAW editing in RT and DT, just to test, and performance has not been a problem.
I compiled RawTherapee on it and used it. This ASUS UX305CA with its Core m3-6Y30 CPU feels as fast in using RawTherapee (preview and saving) as does my Core i7-820QM laptop, while for general use (startup, shutdown, launching programs, programming) it feels much faster than the i7. Even though the m3 CPU is in some ways inferior to the i7, it makes up for that with room to spare by supporting newer features. Further, the m3 uses 4.5W while the i7 tractor uses 45W, meaning the m3 lets me process photos quietly and unplugged for hours, while the i7 rattles the house, wakes the neighbors and drains the battery in 30 minutes when new.
Have anyone considered having a surface tablet for photo processing? I am pretty sure you can run an OS based on Linux kernel on it. The display is pretty good too. Battery is good too but I am not sure how long will it last when you processing images in darktable / RAWTherapee or doing any other heavy on the processor task.
I didnt want to put up a new thread on a frankly boring subject so I hope that by posting my msg here it will still be seen and hopefully answered by somebody…
Here we go – what do you think about this laptop here, considering the cpu+gpu combo and keeping in mind that I will be installing Ubuntu and using it for essentially Darktable, coding in Python+VSCode (that doesn’t require much but I am trying to learn Keras-Tensorflow and that requires a supported gpu) + family-videos editing with Davinci Resolve:
For those that don’t want to click on, it’s an Asus TUF FX505 gaming laptop with:
15,6" FHD IPS screen IPS, anti-glare, 200 nits, Refresh Rate 60Hz, Viewing Angle 170/170, Contrast 700:1, NTSC 45%, SRGB 62,5%, Adobe 47,34%
(not really that important to me, I’m mostly linked to a 27" Benq monitor for my photo editing)
AMD Ryzen 7 3750H
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660Ti 6GB DDR6
RAM 16GB, HDD 1TB SSD Sata + HDD 512GB SSD PCIE
Is the AMD really that good/powerful? A commenter on that amazon page says that the gpu underperforms when linked to this AMD cpu and that it would perform much better paired to an Intel cpu. I remember somebody here saying great things about these AMD cpus.
At the same price (~1100 EUR) there is also this one with an intel cpu and slightly less ssd storage (this is less important, I have spare SSDs that I intend to fit in this new laptop):
As a reference my current laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9560 i7-7700HQ@2.8Ghz Kabylake with a Geforce GTX1050 and 16 Gb ram. Will this Asus laptop be appreciably faster than my current one?
I don’t think either laptop will make editing notocibly faster than it is on your dell. For the AMD system, I’d have a look at the battery life. For the Intel system, I’d see how much speculative execution patches to the Linux kernel slow down your workload. For both machines, check the WiFi/lan drivers work with Linux.
Alright thanks for the tip… Yes I’m not in a rush right now, today I’ll look again how to fix the battery problem with my Dell and hopefully I can get it to work and squeeze a few more months of usage out of it.
About these laptops with AMD CPUs, any particular brand I need to follow their progress? Any possible compatibility issues with Linux?
Well there aren’t any concrete details out yet. I guess all the manufacturers will offer ryzen 4000 in their lineups. Some might even ship with Linux. Details are supposed to be revealed in April.
I’m run an AMD “shop” here in my basement, but I’d wait until someone else takes the early adoption risk on battery life. I bought an AMD-equipped Dell for my wife earlier last year, and the battery life was abysmal compared to any of her earlier Intel articles. Their performance in the new generation sounds promising, but Intel has set a high bar in that aspect.
As you are trying to buy a laptop and hoping that it will serve with photography purposes then you must buy a laptop with HD display. There are some laptops with 4k resolution. You will be amazed by the quality and all of your pictures will be seen with the correct resolution. Go for Acer.
Well to be honest I’d rather have a more economical but good quality HD display like in my current Dell XPS. 4k screens use too much battery, and when I’m at home my laptop is always plugged in and connected to a good quality monitor.
FWIW, there was a bug in darktable 3.0 that caused massive slowdowns with large libraries. It was fixed shortly after release and is in 3.0.1 (and the master branch, of course). This affected not just the lighttable view, but also the darkroom too. Edits were much slower.
If you have a large photo collection in darktable, be sure to upgrade to 3.0.1. Between this one and a ton of performance improvements, you might be able to postpone a laptop upgrade a bit longer.
