Laptop profiles: The Digital Artist

Profile: The Digital Artist

Whether a photographer, a graphic designer, or a DV filmmaker or editor, the Digital Artist in search of a laptop is willing to trade some portability for better performance and a large canvas on which to display high-res photography or HD video. A 15-inch laptop will suffice for many--particularly if you splurge and outfit your studio with an external display--but if you can stand the extra heft, a 17-inch desktop replacement provides a do-it-all machine for on-the-go artistic expression.

Regardless of which size laptop you settle on, you'll want a machine with a speedy dual-core processor, at least 2GB of memory, a 120GB or larger hard drive, and a discrete graphics card. If you are going to throw money at a particular subsystem, put it toward as much memory as you can afford, even if it means selecting a slightly slower CPU or a lesser graphics card. Giving up a few megahertz in processing or scaling back from a 256MB to a 128MB graphics card is worth it if it nets you an additional gigabyte or two of memory. One more note on the graphics card: Don't feel the need to outfit your laptop with the most expensive card offered. The highest-end GPUs prove their worth only with 3D games; what you're really looking for is some dedicated graphics memory (VRAM) to supplement the main system memory.

As for the hard drive, the Digital Artist working with video will require more capacity than one working with static images, such as a photographer or graphic designer. We'd suggest photographers and the like look for a 120GB or a 160GB drive, while videographers should think about a 200GB or a 250GB drive. Also, avoid pokey 4,200rpm drives; instead, choose a hard drive that spins at 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm.

Circling back to the CPU, we recommend looking for a midrange model from the group of CPUs Intel released in May along with its latest Centrino Duo (aka Santa Rosa) platform. Look for a laptop with a Core 2 Duo T7500, T7300, or T7100 processor on one of the Intel 965 chipsets, which will feature an 800MHz frontside bus.

Key specs:

• Screen size: 15- or 17-inch screen
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7500, T7300, or T7100
• Memory: 2GB or more of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 8000 series graphics cards
• Hard drive: 120GB or larger, spinning at 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm

Product picks*:

*Note: Our suggested configurations may differ from the model we reviewed.