Probably you’re sick about those questions, but I need your help again. I want to buy a new notebook to run vvvv on. Right now I think of using it in theatre performances, doing lots mapping and video and live-video stuff, and well lots of things in 3d space.
The biggest ? for me right now ist the graphics card. After searching through the forum, I feel desparate. I’m not even sure if I should get an nvidia graphics card since the optimus technology seems to mess with rendering a lot. On the other hand, AMD cards seem to trouble with shaders. What do you think?
as far as i know the macbook pros dont’t have optimus. windows just runs the 650M Kepler GPU all the time while only OSX is capable of switching between intel and nvidia.
in my oppinion, that’s a good thing. no optimus rubbish. pure direct gpu fun. sure, battery time will be around 4 hours instead of 8 but that’s still quite a lot. and if you do heavy gpu stuff, you will need a powerplug anyway.
trackpad and keyboard usage will definetely need some training since its not a windows laptop. i’m quite happy with my 3 year old macbook pro (9600M GT), not because its a fancy apple thing but it’s sturdy, thin, does all my proof of concept patches, even the particle library.
i remember seeing at least 75% macbooks at the last NODE festival.
Get a Clevo laptop, for that money you get an almost top of line, I got mine in Spain at Mountain Computers, but there are resellers everywhere under different brands, in USA it is system76, etc.
edit: on a more serious note, don’t get a mac if you’re not a mac Os user yet. While the whole package is kind of nice, you’re likely to be annoyed by key remapping, lack of touchpad buttons, whimsy gpu etc… The only rather nice thing about macbooks is the standard thunderbolt port. I’ve always been a fan of thinkpads, but right now they don’t offer a machine that really suits vvvv right either. so i guess i’d go with clevo/eurocomm/mountain/schenker too…
iam not a big fan of glossy screens but that machine has an ultrabay slot that is capable of another graphics card in SLI mode, another fan (cool for live visuals in a club) or another hdd.
that sli thing is pretty cool i think, two gt650m in a 15" never saw that before…
as @m4d already pointed out you’re better off going with a custom built laptop that doesn’t have a well known brand name. You will get more bang for your money.
PS. add the extra cost for a matte screen, it’s definitely worth it.
To complete the whole thing: I bought a Schenker XMG Notebook, with a geforce675MX graphics card. I didn’t do much patching yet, but in a few days I will report, if there is any trouble.
As for now I’m not having many troubles, besides that when I start an old patch, that I used on other machines, the wmv playback in some cases doesn’t work. The colors are completely weird. when I start the videos outside v4, in media-player for example, they play back well. Haven’t had time to investigate that yet.
