Creativity is what separates humans from animals. It is the very foundation of life. Art, poetry, and anything creative are something which only humans can create. But the thing with creativity is, it is frustrating.
Some days you might not have any creativity and no new idea might be popping into your head and the last thing you want is a laptop that doesn't work. So we have curated a list of the best laptops for graphic design. We hope you get to create even better art than you ever had with these new machines.
One of the essential components of the laptop of a graphic designer is a graphics card and we have found one for every budget. Those who create videos might need something a bit more powerful than those who do just artistic work and create flyers and ads of that sort. So here's the list of best laptops for graphic designers.
Best Laptop for Graphic Designers
The best laptop for graphic designers are:
1. Editor's Choice: Lenovo Legion Y540
Buy from AmazonProcessor: 9th Generation Core Intel I5-9300H processor
RAM: 8GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GTX 1650 Graphics
Storage: 1 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD
Display: 15.6-inch screen with (1920X1080) full HD display
The Legion Y540 is a great laptop that comes from Lenovo. It comes with all the bells and whistles required for a laptop for designers, including a powerful processor, an SSD and a great graphics card. The laptop is perfect for those who edit video also; owing to the performance of the graphics card and RAM.
The laptop is powered by a 9th-generation Intel Core i5-9300H which has a base speed of 2.4GHz and a maximum clock speed of 4.1GHz. The processor is a quad-core processor and offers excellent performance. The powerful processor helps in the loading of programs faster and smoother.
The graphics card in this laptop is a no-nonsense 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. This is one of the latest graphics cards on the market. The card has 4GB of video memory making this perfect for editing videos. All of Adobe's suite of tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Adobe Premiere Rush work smoothly on this laptop.
The laptop comes with 8GB of RAM. If you do a lot of video editing, we recommend that you upgrade the RAM to 16 or 32GB to extract even more performance from the laptop.
For storage, it has a 256GB SSD paired with a 1TB HDD. The SSD provides you with great load speeds while gaming. SSD loads the data faster to the RAM thereby increasing the overall load times of the game.
This is a no-nonsense laptop with performance that we find excellent for the money we are paying. Everything is new and care has been taken to give the best feeling of satisfaction to the owner.
It has a 15.6" display with a 60Hz refresh rate. The full HD display gives a resolution of 1920x1080. The display is anti-glare and offers IPS-level quality. The colours in the display are vivid and excellent for designers.
The laptop weighs 2.3kg which is a bit clunky, but then all laptops with a graphics card are heavy so we wouldn't hold it against this laptop. It offers a battery life of 5 hours.
Lenovo gives a one-year on-site warranty to the laptop so you don't have to worry about the costs that might be incurred if something breaks in the laptop.
2. Our budget pick: Mi Notebook Horizon Edition
Buy from AmazonProcessor: 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10510U processor
RAM: 8GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: Nvidia MX350 2GB GDDR5 Graphics
Storage: 512 GB SSD
Display: 14-Inch (1920X 1080 )Full HD Anti-Glare Screen
Mi is a new entrant in the laptop space but one that creates excellent laptops. It has surpassed other laptop manufacturers and has created a laptop which is budgeted as well as offers excellent performance.
The laptop is powered by the latest processor. It has a tenth-generation Intel Core i7-10510U processor. It has a base speed of 1.8GHz and a maximum clock speed of 4.9GHz. It is a quad-core processor and has two threads per core, taking the thread count to a total of 8. The laptop is very powerful and works smoothly during the usage of software such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. You can easily edit large files without having to worry about any lag or Photoshop crashing.
For RAM, the laptop has 8GB of DDR4 RAM. This is also enough for most of your editing needs. If you do heavy video editing we don't recommend this laptop since the RAM is soldered on and you can't upgrade the RAM. Otherwise, we strongly recommend you get this laptop.
The laptop comes with a 512GB SSD for storage. This should be ample for all your needs. The use of an SSD instead of an HDD will boost the performance of the laptop marginally. The load times of Photoshop and Illustrator will decrease marginally and that will help you not get frustrated with loading the applications.
Another major thing that has to be considered is the display. The colour accuracy of the display is something that affects designers much because if the colours on the display are not accurate, it might cause issues. The display on the laptop is a Full HD display with a resolution of 1920x1080 and provides great accuracy. It has a contrast ratio of 965:1.
The laptop has a graphics card, which will help you render images and videos. The graphics card is an Nvidia MX360 graphics card. It is a powerful graphics card and will help in faster renderings.
The battery life on the laptop is 10 hours and that's great considering the industry standards. Overall the laptop offers great performance and we love the laptop.
3. Microsoft Surface Pro 7
Buy from AmazonProcessor: 10th Generation Intel Core i5-1035G4 Processor
RAM: 8GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: Intel Iris Plus Graphics
Storage: 128GB SSD
Display: 12.3 inch 2736 x 1824 Pixelsense display
It hasn't been long since Microsoft has ventured into making laptops but they attempt to topple Apple. Since they provide the hardware and the software components for the laptop they can make the software more flexible to accommodate the laptop.
One of the best examples of the seamlessness offered by hardware-software integration is the Microsoft Surface Dial. A lot of cool features which Dial can do is made possible because of the software that is underneath.
The Microsoft Surface Pro is powered by a 10th-generation i5-1035G4 processor. The processor is a quad-core processor with two threads per processor. The laptop has a base speed of 1.10GHz and a maximum clock speed of 3.70GHz. This makes the laptop extremely smooth.
One of the questions that remain unanswered is whether this is a laptop or a tablet. The line drawn is very thin and that makes it even more worth it. Most designers would find tablets to be better when it comes to making designs and drawings. I do some paintings and digital art on an iPad with Procreate and find the experience to be great. A laptop wouldn't come anywhere near the experience a tablet gives. Yes, you can use a Wacom, but that's additional money. And I think Microsoft has done the perfect job of bridging the gap and bringing the best of both worlds.
Moving on, the tablet, err laptop comes with Windows 10 preinstalled.
The display on the laptop is a 12.3-inch Pixelsense display. It has a resolution of 2736x1824, which makes for great pixel density. We were blown by the display. You can keep the display as close as you want and not see individual pixels. The colour accuracy is also great making for a better design.
The laptop weighs just 0.77kg making it ultra-portable. It also has a battery life of 10 hours, so you can use it on the go.
For storage, there is a 128GB SSD. This should be enough for most needs, otherwise, you'll have to upload to the Cloud or use an external storage device. It has a micro SD card reader built into it so you can plug your camera's SD card without having to look for a reader. You can also expand the storage with the SD card slot.
4. Dell XPS 9570
Buy from AmazonProcessor: 10th Gen i7-10750H processor
RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti 4GB GDDR6
Storage: 1 TB HDD
Display: 17" FHD+ (1920 x 1200) Infinity Edge Non-Touch Anti-Glare 500-Nit Display
XPS is Dell's premium line of office laptops and we are big fans of the series. The XPS used to be a gaming lineup until they bought Alienware. Now the XPS lineup has evolved to bring excellent performance, quality and awesomeness.
The laptop is powered by a 10th-generation Intel i7-10750H processor. The processor is a hexacore processor making it greatly fast. The multiple cores will help in rendering videos and images faster. It has a base speed of 2.60GHz and a maximum clock speed of 5.00GHz.
The laptop is meant for creatives as illustrated by the Studio Quality display on this laptop. The display is an FHD display with a resolution of 1920x1080. It is equipped with 100% Adobe RGB and 94% DCI-P3 colour gamut to make the colours true to real life. It has a contrast ratio of 1650:1 making it impeccable. The display also has EyeSafe technology which reduces the harmful blue light while working for long hours.
The graphics card on the laptop is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. This is a 4GB graphics card and offers impeccable performance in rendering videos. The graphics card is based on Turing architecture. The processor has 896 Cuda Cores. The more the number of Cuda Cores, the more the performance. You can think of them to be the same as processor cores but with each core a lot less powerful than the CPU core.
The major difference between a graphics card and a processor is that when the processor has a few high-performing cores, a graphics card has a large number of low-performance cores. This helps to delegate each part of the image to a separate core to build the image faster.
The laptop comes with 16GB DDR4 RAM with a clock speed of 2933MHz. This vast amount of storage space helps in faster video editing as it can store a lot of data as a buffer. The laptop also has a 1TB SSD for storing data. The SSD will make your laptop a lot faster especially when editing videos and large files since there are a lot of read and write operations on the disk.
The build quality of the XPS laptop is also great. It has a carbon fibre hand rest which makes it feel so premium. The cooling vents on the laptop are also located greatly to cool the laptop after long hours of gaming.
The keyboard on the laptop is also great to type on and works excellently. Overall the laptop is a great package and we love it.
5. HP Envy x360
Buy from AmazonProcessor: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U Quad-Core processor
RAM: 8GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics
Storage: 512GB SSD
Display: 13.3-inch Full HD (1920x1080) Corning Gorilla Glass Touchscreen Display
If you want a touch screen 2-in-1 laptop that blows the competition out of the water in terms of sheer power, this is the laptop that you should be going for.
Powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U Quad-Core processor, the laptop has a base processor clock speed of 2.1GHz and a burst frequency of 3.7GHz. If you are a fan of Intel processors, you can compare this to the Intel i5 lineup. Offers great performance and value for money.
The HP Envy is one of the most gorgeous laptops I've seen. A laptop that is ultra-think and usable as well. The laptop has a 13.3-inch screen which seems a bit small, but when you use it as a tablet, it is a huge screen. One of the things which I loved about HP is the fact that they added a tilt pen to the combo. With most of the laptop makers you have to buy the pen or pencil tool separately, but HP was like have one for free.
The tilt pen works smoothly on the laptop and you can use it to draw and illustrate on the laptop. Using Illustrator and other vector-based tools where a breeze with the tilt pen.
The display is made of Corning Gorilla Glass so you don't have to worry about accidentally scratching the surface while using the touch screen.
The laptop comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 512GB of storage. This should be enough for most of the daily needs a designer would encounter. The laptop is convertible and can be used as a tablet which is one of the greatest features that makes it so attractive to designers.
The graphics card in the laptop is a Vega 8 graphics card. It offers decent performance and is usable in day-to-day life. This is an integrated graphics card and we would prefer dedicated graphics cards when video editing. But if your designing mostly involves editing images and illustrations, this is a must-buy. One of the best laptops for designers.
It weighs 1.3kg and is ultra-portable. It has a 4cell ultra fast-charging battery and comes with a 1-year domestic warranty.
6. New Apple MacBook Pro
Buy from AmazonProcessor: Ninth-generation 6-core Intel Core i7 processor
RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: Intel UHD Graphics
Storage: 512GB SSD
Display: 16-inch screen
No list is complete without mentioning the Apple MacBook Pro. The go-to designing equipment for most designers. The MacBook Pro is a truly revolutionary machine and is great for designing. This is the machine used by most of the top designers in top companies.
The laptop features an i7 processor to give the best performance. The laptop is smooth and loads extremely fast thanks to the MacOS the laptop features. The processor is a 9th-generation Intel Core i7 processor.
It has 16GB of DDR4 RAM to provide butter smooth experience. For storage, the laptop comes with a 1TB SSD for easier and faster access to data.
It has an AMD Radeon 5300M graphics card to offer dazzling fast video renderings and image processing. The graphics card is a dedicated graphics card and offers 4GB of video memory. The graphics card competes directly with the GTX 1650 graphics card and offers performance that rivals the Nvidia card.
One of the cooler features of the laptop is the touch bar and touch id. The laptop has a touch bar in place of function keys. This is a small display that changes with the application. When you're using Photoshop or Illustrator the touch bar shows the keys which you're more likely to use such as the pen tool and undo and so on.
When editing videos, it will show you a scrub bar and other small widgets which makes the process easier. The touch bar also has a touch id with which you can unlock the laptop and use features such as Apple Pay. You also don't have to remember your passwords anymore due to a feature called Key-chain which remembers your passwords and you can use them with your touch id.
Overall this is one of the laptops which offer great value for money and performance for designers and a laptop many designers swear by.
