Things to Consider while choosing Your Creator Laptop
What do you mean by a Creator Laptop?
A Creator Laptop is a laptop designed primarily to facilitate heavy-duty content creation tasks. With the increasing popularity of gadgets and online video streaming services, the demand for high-quality content is at its peak. Today, more and more people are getting involved with content creation on a personal and professional level. However, while considering their demands of high-quality content creation tasks, the traditional laptop generally cannot fulfil their requirements. That's why this category of laptops was introduced, promising better efficiency and power for these new demands.
What to look for in a Creator Laptop
If you belong to a content creation background, then you will definitely need a laptop to deal with various media workflows like video/audio editing, 3D rendering, graphic design, or game development. These creator laptops are not only proven to be powerful performance machines but also include various features that could enhance the efficiency of your workflow.
Performance: The Essence of a Creator Laptop
The software utilized by creators for content creation usually calls for higher computing performance. The poor performance of a standard laptop may lead to decreased efficiency or even increase the chances of system crashes and instances where you lose your work. That's why stable high performance is a prerequisite for a creator laptop. The high performance is driven by powerful CPU & GPU chipsets. While choosing your next creator laptop, we recommend a model with at least an Intel Core i7 H series CPU and an NVIDIA GTX/RTX GPU.
The H series i7 CPU performs 15~20% better than the U series i7 and characterizes more processing cores, which is mandatory for those resource dependent applications like Adobe Premiere Pro. NVIDIA is releasing new graphic drivers that could boost the efficiency of your laptop while running software that relies on the GPU. If you demand stronger performance from your GPU for larger scale or more complex 3D rendering, a higher-end GPU like the RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3070 Ti is the one to go for.
Thermal Design: Guarantees good performance
To ensure that there's no performance drop when using the CPU & GPU for extended periods of time, the thermal design of a creator laptop is key. Poor thermal design may lead to CPU/GPU throttling, which reduces the performance and increases the chance of system crashes. So when choosing a creator laptop, a model featuring multiple heat pipes, dual system fans, and multiple air vents are the prime factors. The more heat pipes used in the thermal system, the more heat can be blown out from the CPU & GPU via dual fans, and the more heated airflow could be blown out from the chassis to maintain a healthy system temperature.
Besides CPU & GPU, RAM & storage is also critical for overall performance. Most creation software will utilize a huge amount of RAM while running, so it’s always recommended to select the creator laptop that offers at least 16GB of RAM. If we talk about storage, a model with SSDs is suggested over ones with with HDD storage. SSDs are much faster in accessing speed and can drastically reduce the time required to process those file actions. We recommend a creator laptop featuring at least two M.2 slots which permit future SSD upgrades should be chosen.
A Great Display: The Key to Precise Creation
There are three characteristics of display on a laptop: colour accuracy, colour gamut, and resolution. Among the three factors, colour accuracy plays a major role. If the colour presented on display is not visually accurate, it may bring serious problems to the end result - graphic designers would agree. So consider a laptop with a display that is pre-calibrated to promise the most accurate colour representation. For the colour gamut, it's better to opt for the model with a wider colour gamut like AdobeRGB 100% or DCI-P3 100% while doing your creative tasks.
Connectivity: Making Creation Easy
Connectivity is an often overlooked feature when it comes to laptops. However, it is extremely significant when it comes to a creator laptop because while performing tasks, the creator will often attach a series of devices such as an external monitor, SSD drives, external graphic cards and more. Limited connectivity could not only be inefficient, but also lead to additional costs by way of adapters and connectors. Consider a model featuring versatile connections such as HDMI 2.0, DP 1.4, RJ-45 or Thunderbolt. In case your laptop is restrictive on this, try to get a universal adapter - something like what apple offers for MacBooks.
Portability: The Core Requirement for a Laptop
The things mentioned above are quite necessary for a creator laptop. The vital reason to choose laptops instead of a desktop is mobility or portability. Great portability comes from having a light weight & long battery life. The lighter the weight, the easier it is to carry the laptop around. A longer battery life could reduce the need to search for power outlets or even bring the power adapter out when you're working on the go.
We've found that laptops that weigh around 2kg or less with a battery life of over 7 hrs on a single charge tend to be the most portable. Apple MacBooks do this really well - especially the new MacBook Pro.
Concluding
Laptops come in various shapes and sizes, features and specs - but it comes down to us, the creators, to make the right choice given what we intend to do with our creator laptops. We hope that this article helps you make a great choice of laptop. Also check out our articles about high performance routers to enhance your work. Happy creating!