If you can go for an AMD ryzen 3000 series based system atm. Intel seems to have a lot of problems with their CPUs still. even the very latest CPUs are affected by the recent round of CPU bugs. no need to buy a CPU that will get slower over time because they need to implement yet another round of work arounds for hardware bugs.
Also for photo editing consider a GPU. You will not have the laptop just for a year or 2 and if you see experiments like vkdt … (which is mile faster than darktable atm) it will be the future.
I read somewhere that the 10 series is actually worse in some areas. Depending on whether the RAM is soldered or not, you could upgrade it later. Even with soldering, if you learn how, it could be undone.
I would go for the RAM. 8 GB is like a minimum now. I think 8 → 16gb will be better in the long run than i5 → i7. Is the laptop one that soldiers the ram to the mother board?
Nope. Real ports and exchangeable boards. I think I will end up with the Tuxedo 15 (a Linux-specific brand) and they offer to add 116 or 28. Apparently 2 boards of 8 are an advantage over 1 board of 16 GB…
Depends on the motherboard and how the RAM slots are connected. If they share lanes, then the throughput of each slot is limited and it would be better to put in parallel RAM modules. If each slot is connected to enough, then it won’t matter. There is probably a better way of describing this; I am not a hardware nut.
Yes, likely the system can use 2 “channels” of RAM. Think of it like 2 cores on a CPU, allows more things to happen simultaneously by spreading reads and writes.
I fit is the TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 15 v5, and you think you will be happy with an i5, I would go for:
1x32 GBytes memory (+180€)
no SSD (-75€ for removing a 250GB SSD)
If you have that laptop more than 4-5 years, one thing is clear: everything (video, images, …) will be bigger (think about bigger sensor pixel count, or pixel shift with multiple shots), and although the processor will struggle a bit, most probably you won’t be able to load huge pictures with 16GB of memory.
And you have very good SSDs around 500GB for 60-65€, right now (e.g. Crucial MX500 500GB).
I changed and got me a used Thinkpad 15.6" with an I7 and 32 GB from 2016. Not the newest PC, but well priced … and still four years younger than the one I use now ;o)
Definitely! As I configured my AMD FX8350 (8 cores) machine in 2013 I went for 32 GB of slower RAM instead of 16 GB of faster RAM. Of course having 32 GB RAM is nice when processing large files or running a virtual machine with a different OS, the slower RAM clearly made optimizations to RT harder (though at the end for a benefit), because I had to rule out or overcome the memory bandwidth limitations…
I would wait till next year. AMD will release notebook CPUs at the beginning of next year. As they are producing with 7nm they eat less battery and don’t have all the CPU bugs Intel has. Each new Intel bug reduces performance by ~3%. So with a current Intel CPU you loose 18-30% performance the mitigations depending on the workload. So if you can, wait for the notebooks with new AMD CPUs and go with more and fast RAM. The AMD stuff will probably be cheaper and faster than what Intel provides …
Beside @afre’s straight to the point comment, if you are on a budget, or like me, rarely buys the latest and newest I doesn’t really matter what the latest is. I am watching it from the sideline.
What looks interesting to me though, hardware with TB3 and a external GPU. Specially interesting if you have several PC and could swap the GPU with a cable click.
It looks good but so far I didn’t really investigated if it makes sense. RT/dt run quite well on my low power hardware, where I like to see some speed improvement would be Blender. Not sure what type of GPU RT/dt really need. Really hate the all the talk is always around gaming, gaming and more gaming.
If you are curious about external GPU, this was to google top link: https://egpu.io/best-egpu-buyers-guide/ (ok, most are just just cases and you still need to buy a graphic card, damn)
darktable uses OpenCL for its GPU acceleration, and both AMD and Nvidia support OpenCL. Newer AMD.cards that support their ROCm driver will be the easiest install on Linux
and don’t have all the CPU bugs Intel has. Each new Intel bug reduces performance by ~3%. So with a current Intel CPU you loose 18-30% performance the mitigations depending on the workload
I was extremely surprised about your statement.
I am fully aware of the huge past bugs concerning Intel CPUs and the consequent damage related to their performances.
However, I have never read about this vast problems still present in their current CPUs.
Can you support your view with some benchmark?
For instance, If you take a look at some on-line benchmarks comparing:
Intel I7 CPU 8850H vs Intel I7 9850H
The 9850H, the new CPU, is always faster in every comparison I have checked…
Of couse, there is not a big difference between the 2 contenteders, but it is present and documented.
Disclaimer:
Personally, I have always suggested to buy Intel I7 CPUs even though they are more expensive than the “corresponding” AMD CPUs (therefore my opinion is totally biased…).
As regards the new Intel I7 CPUs released every year or so, the improvements in terms of speed are not generally outstanding and I often suggest to buy the previous version to spare some money…
As an aside, I think that since the Intel CPUs are more widespread (at least in Italy) they are more tested than the AMD CPUs. Therefore, it is easier to reveal their flaws and bugs
