5 Best Laptops For Graphic Design (April 2016)
Graphic designers are creative people who don’t always like to work in their office. They might switch from their desks to public gardens or may take their work on family trips, so they need something which is powerful and portable at the same time. This is what we researched and put into this article we gathered all best laptops which can deliver high end performance and which are lighter in weight so that it could be easy to carry your laptop and work from anywhere. In this article we have got few of the best laptops for graphic design which will fit in budget of everyone.
Normally when we are dealing with graphic designing work, it is good to have a laptop with high specifications to make photos and video rendering faster, but this is not the case every time. It depends upon what type of designing work you do, well if it is 4K or 8K video rendering thing then definitely you will need a laptop with good processor, at least 12 GB of RAM, dedicated graphics card and may be Solid State Drives instead of normal Hard Drives to work faster and efficiently. But we don’t actually need the same specification laptop to do light graphic designing works which include using software like Adobe Photoshop or CorelDraw. In this case 8 GB RAM, moderate processor, moderate graphics card and hard drive will do.
I have gathered here laptops of both high and moderate specifications so that you can identify what is right for your graphic designing work. Of-course these laptops cost high as they have got high specifications inside but it is necessary that it should also fit in your budget and fulfill your necessities, so let us now talk about prices of laptop for graphic design. Normally laptops for graphic designing start from $800 and raises up to $2000 or even more. Of-course laptops with high price will have more high specifications and they will work faster but that doesn’t mean laptops with lower budget will not be able to handle high end graphic designing works. They can, but slower comparatively with high budget ones. Below are few of the best laptops for graphic designing work right now in market and I have explained in detail about all laptops. I have also mentioned which laptop is good for what kind of works so that it would be easier for you to identify laptop of your graphic designing needs.
Best Laptops for Graphic Design – Top Picks
1) Apple MacBook Pro 13.3-Inch Laptop (Newest Version) –
Editor’s Choice – Best Laptop for Graphic Designing
If budget is not a concern to you then MacBook pro is one of the best graphic designing laptop to go with. There is nothing to say about its design as all Apple products have outstanding user friendly designs but as here we are talking about graphic designing laptops we should talk about weight of this laptop. This laptop weighs just 3.5 pounds so it is ultra-portable machine which would be easier to carry around. Looking at its 13.3-inch Retina Display with resolution of 2560×1600 which Apple claims to be the most beautiful display ever built for laptops. I think this laptop’s smaller and high resolution screen would be perfect for any sort of designing works. Track pad of this laptop also supports multi finger gestures and even it is force touch track pad so it would be easier to use designing and editing software on this laptop. Now if we take a look at its hardware configuration then it is powered by most powerful and efficient Intel Core i7 5th Generation chip along with 16 GB RAM and Intel Iris 6100 Graphics, undoubtedly this laptop will be able to handle any kind of high end designing works without any hiccups. Thanks to its 512 GB of SSD storage which makes transferring of huge files faster like never before, so with this laptop you will never have to wait for more time if you are dealing with high resolution image or video rendering. I think this laptop is perfect mixture for graphic designing work and it comes with latest Mac OS which will be able to run every graphic designing software which you need on the go. Apart from this things it has battery life of up to 10 hours which is outstanding. I would recommend this laptop to people who has to deal with high end graphic designing works and to those who are looking for ultra-portable and high performance laptop for graphic design.
| OS | Mac OS X Yosemite |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR3 RAM |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 3.1GHz Dual-core Processor and Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz |
| DISPLAY | 13.3-inch IPS Retina Display with 2560 x 1600 Resolution |
| Hard Disk | 512 GB SSD |
| GRAPHICS | Intel Iris Graphics 6100 |
| BATTERY BACKUP | Up to 10 Hours |
Price – $2,699.00
2) Acer Aspire V15 Nitro Black Edition Laptop –
Another beast but this one is from Acer which is also one of the well-known laptop manufacturing brand. This laptop is actually made for gaming so it is packing tremendous power inside which I think would be best for graphic designing as well. Looking at the design of this laptop then it is made from high quality durable plastic and brushed aluminum at some places. Laptop looks premium and it weighs 9 pound so it would be perfect graphic designing gear on the go. It has 15.6 inches of Full HD display which is bright enough and shows everything in extreme details so graphic designing would be real pleasure on this laptop. You are getting sturdy keyboard and track pad which supports multi finger gestures so it would be easier to operate windows 8.1 on this laptop. Well this laptop does ship with windows 8.1 but it can be upgraded to windows 10. Now let us talk about hardware specifications of this laptop. It is rocking inside Intel Core i7 Chip which is one of the perfect engine for power users who need unparalleled performance for high end photos or videos editing. It has 8 GB of RAM which you could expand up to 32 GB by putting another RAMs in other slots. I think this would be great thing if you are looking for laptop which could be with you for next 5-6 years. You are also getting 1 TB of hard drive which is not as fast as SSD but it does work faster than normal Hard Drives. Last but not the least it has got latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M as graphics engine which never lacks in fulfilling any kinds of graphic needs. According to me this is one of the best laptop for graphic designing which is also in budget and also it is capable of handling extreme graphic designing works.
| OS | Windows 8.1 64-bit (Upgradable to Windows 10) |
| RAM | 8 GB DDR3 RAM |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 4710 HQ 2.50 GHz Quad Core Processor |
| DISPLAY | 15.6-inch Full HD Display with 1920 x 1080 Resolution |
| Hard Disk | 1 TB HDD |
| GRAPHICS | NVIDIA GTX 860M 2 GB |
| BATTERY BACKUP | Up to 5 Hours |
Price – $999.99
3) Lenovo Y50 4k 15.6-Inch Laptop –
After looking at this laptop, we can say that this laptop is built from scratch for graphic designing. From design to its hardware specifications, everything is kept together in such a way that you can enjoy extreme power of this laptop on the go. I loved shape of this laptop and its sharp curves at various places, even it has full keyboard with numeric pad and touch pad of this laptop is also convenient to use. Lenovo Y50 has 4K display which shows everything in extreme details. It also has air intakes in bottom and sides so you won’t face heating issues with this laptop. Overall design and build quality is really astonishing with which graphic designers will fell in love. Now if we talk about its hardware specifications then this graphic design laptop from Lenovo is powered by Intel Core i7 processor with clock speed of 2.4 GHz which is best for high graphic simulation. It is rocking inside 16 GB of RAM which makes multi-tasking on this buttery smooth even while using designing software. It also has dedicated graphics card of 2 GB from NVIDIA which helps in handling everything in 4K resolution. To make your laptop boot faster or transfer files at lightning speeds, this power book from laptop has 256 GB of SSD. Apart from delivering this much of power its battery stays up for 5 hours which is really get for those people who likes to take their work at different places. I think this is the perfect and best laptop for graphic design which is even budget friendly in my choice.
| OS | Windows 8.1 64-bit (Upgradable to Windows 10) |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR3 RAM |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 4700 HQ 2.4 GHz Processor |
| DISPLAY | 15.6-inch UHD 4K Display with 3840 x 2160 Resolution |
| Hard Disk | 256 GB SSD |
| GRAPHICS | NVIDIA GTX 860M 2 GB |
| BATTERY BACKUP | Up to 5 Hours |
Price – $1,139.90
4) Dell XPS13 Touchscreen Ultra book –
We all know that Dell is giant laptop manufacturing company and with this laptop they actually proved it. I saw this laptop personally and used it for hour or two and all I can say about this laptop is – This is future of laptop. Well that is not reason to keep it in the list of best laptops for graphic design. Let me give you brief overview of this laptop, first reason is its ultra-portability. It weighs just 2.8 pounds and it is surprisingly thin which makes this laptop best to use on the go. If you didn’t noticed then; I would like to tell you that XPS 13 weight is less than MacBook so if you are looking for windows alternative of MacBook then this would be perfect daily graphics designing driver. It has got 13.3 inch of quad HD touch screen display with almost zero display frame. This what makes this laptop stand out from all other laptops listed here because you see nothing but what’s on your screen and which I think will be best for graphic designing works. Overall build quality of this laptop is good and it could resist daily wears and tears of your life. This laptop comes in three different variants of low, moderate and high hardware specifications priced at $1,319, $1,322 and $1,625 respectively. I would be talking here about moderate specification laptop but if you want to buy low or high hardware specification versions of this laptop then you can check them on amazon from here. Particularly moderate specification version of this laptop is powered by Intel Core i5 5th Generation processor which are outstanding in performance and they do manage to save battery at the same time. It has 8 GB of RAM which is more than enough to run any graphic designing software and multitask with multiple desktops on windows 10. For best viewing experience with this laptop, it has Intel HD graphics which are sufficient enough to view everything in 4K details. It also has 256 GB of SSD so video renderings would be lightning fast on this laptop. Though it has these high specifications it manages to run up to 15 hours in one time full charge of battery which again makes this laptop a big deal. Dell XPS 13 is perfect for graphic designers and for people who are looking for MacBook alternative for any possible reasons. I would recommend this laptop for moderate as well as high end graphic designing works.
| OS | Windows 8.1 64-bit (Upgradable to Windows 10) |
| RAM | 8 GB DDR3 RAM |
| CPU | Intel Core i5 5200U 2.20 GHz Processor Turbo Boost up to 2.70 GHz |
| DISPLAY | 13.3-inch UHD 4K Display with 3200 x 1800 Resolution |
| Hard Disk | 256 GB SSD |
| GRAPHICS | Intel HD Graphics 5500 |
| BATTERY BACKUP | Up to 15 Hours |
Price – $1,322.00
5) HP Envy 15T Touch Screen QHD Laptop –
Sturdy, powerful and ultra-portability are the key features to look at when we are looking for graphic designing laptops. Well this laptop from HP has got them all, it has aluminum body which looks good and tough enough to work from any conditions. HP is actually not a good player laptop displays but Envy 15T comes with 4K touch screen display with resolution of 3200 x 1800 which is super bright and shows everything in extreme details. Even it has full keyboard and touch pad with support of multi finger gestures, so it would be more convenient to use windows 10 on this laptop. Although this laptop is full aluminum built, it weighs 5.6 pounds so this laptop is also better to work on the go. These was all about design of laptop but when it comes to hardware HP Envy 15t leaves everything behind. Like almost every other laptop in this list, this one is also powered by Intel i7 processor family and 16 GB of RAM but you are getting 1 TB of SSD installed with this power pack. You do get other specification options with this laptop but the one which I am talking about is top variant among all. Apart from that this HP laptop is having NVIDIA 950M GTX 4 GB of graphics chip which is among the best graphics processor available in the market right now. Overall this laptop is perfect power pack for high end graphic designing works or any other works which needs more juice.
| OS | Windows 8.1 64-bit (Upgradable to Windows 10) |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR3 RAM |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 5th Generation Processor (newest) |
| DISPLAY | 15.6-inch QHD + WLED backlit UWVA Touch Screen display with 3200 x 1800 resolution |
| Hard Disk | 1 TB SSD |
| GRAPHICS | 4 GB Discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M |
| BATTERY BACKUP | Up to 7 Hours |
Price – $1,899.95
If you are looking for cheaper graphic designing laptops then have a look at our other budget oriented laptop buying guides –
That’s all people. I hope this buying guide on laptops for graphic design help you in buying best laptop for yourself. If you have any questions on any laptops then ask me in comments section below. I will get back to you as soon as possible.
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